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Last week, I wrote about elevator pitch (yet again). I said (again) that your One True Pitch has a hundred daughters, and some of those daughters are visual.

Your book cover is the most obvious example, but Facebook ads would be another one. And whereas you only get one book cover, you can have a zillion FB ads if you want to (and, erm, if you’re self-publishing. FB ads are a niche that only work for indie authors.) What’s more, those FB ads give you hard numerical data on what works and what doesn’t – and part of my email last week suggested that if the elevator pitch isn’t properly expressed in the image, then it won’t ultimately succeed in terms of sales.

I’d say that, on the whole, my data bears that out. (And some books have a much simpler way to express their elevator pitch in visual terms. Those books are easiest to advertise.) 

Now, that’s all jolly interesting but: 

1. Lots of books won’t get FB ads (because they may be trad published by publishers who focus on print sales). 

2. The success of a book is more heavily determined by a cover than by the ads: if you have a lousy cover, no marketing in the world will save the book. 

3. And the book cover is the older, more senior daughter. The look of the cover has to determine the look of any advertising campaign (and, in fact, any visual materials produced in any context), because all those visual materials have to set up the right expectations: “This is the thing we want you to buy.” 

So what works for a book cover? Well, a strong pitch, visually expressed. 

As I said last week, you can’t necessarily get the entire pitch into a visual and you don’t have to. You just have to make sure that the pitch and the image are extremely consistent. You need to feel the pitch at least partially expressed in the cover. 

And, because the most arresting element of any cover is the title, then you really want to think of the cover as being the sum of Image and Title with those two things working harmoniously with one another. 

Here’s an example of all that working p-p-p-perfectly:

The book is a big bestseller by my colleague, Becca, who's Head of Marketing and Membership at JW Towers. 

I don’t know exactly how she would frame the elevator pitch, but it’s something like: 

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin + letters from a previous wife. 

That’s a pretty damn solid elevator pitch, and it’s right there on the cover. 

Woman? Yes, in massive text. 

Remote cabin? Yes, in massive text and as the lead element of the visual. As a matter of fact, the text ‘cabin’ could mean some kind of beach-side cabin that’s part of a group of 100 or more. This artwork makes it damn clear: this cabin is remote. It’s alone. It’s isolated. 

Creepy guy? Well, no… but also kind of yes. The man doesn’t feature in the title or in the image, but you sort of feel him there. The blue and yellow colour tones in the cover have become a kind of uniform for psychological thriller books. The creative part of me never loves a uniform… but they’re definitely a sweet and lovely guide to genre. They’re another way to convey information. And here, the blue and yellow (and the twilight), all say, “creepy domestic drama.” So yes, there’s a creepy man around here. You’d feel kind of baffled if you picked the book up and he wasn’t there in the blurb. 

Letters from the wife before? OK, this is not in big text and it’s not an element in the image. (Nor should it be: it would just look awful if there was some handwritten letters layered onto the image somehow.) But – well, you have your shoutline to play with, a subtitle, in effect. And that doesn’t mention letters, but it does strongly hint in that direction: “You’re not the first. Will you be the last?” Nine words that complete delivery of the pitch. 

The cover + image delivers the whole damn pitch, perfectly. 

Books almost never sell at real scale unless they deliver a great reader experience, so I don’t want to pull any praise away from Becca’s actual writing. (I’ve just started the book: I’m 50 pages in and loving it.) 

But Becca tells me that the publisher of this book at one stage contemplated changing the title and the cover design. The title was going to be “The Woman Before” and the image was going to be of someone washing up. 

You can kind of feel the thinking going on there. This is a domestic drama. Maybe lean on the last part of the elevator pitch more heavily, the idea that this current wife is successor to an unknown previous one? 

But Becca pushed back, and she was right to do it. The remoteness of the location was absolutely central to the pitch. If you had to trim the pitch down to three elements, not four, it would be: 

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin.

The book sells because of teasing the reader: what would it be like to be a woman, alone in some remote place, with a guy whom you now find creepy? The previous wife just gives you a steer on the particular kind of creepiness involved, but that’s kind of secondary. Woman + creepy guy + cabin: that’s the bit that really matters. 

Oh yes: I will also say that a good book cover should stand at an oblique angle to the title. It should offer a different take, or it’s not really intriguing. 

The most obvious cover here would have been “picture of cabin with woman in window.” But then the reader learns nothing from the cover than they have from the title. Those very literal covers nearly always fall flat. 

When books of mine have failed, the cover has always been at the heart of the failure. 

Here’s the American hardcover of my first Fiona Griffiths book: 

That sort of expresses “woman uncertain of her identity”, but it doesn’t say “this is a crime novel”. It doesn’t reference murder and crime investigation and being a detective.

If you were told this was an existential novel by a French feminist philosopher, you’d probably think: (a) yep, perfect cover, and (b) I won’t buy that until the Ice Age after next. 

Sure enough, that book had stellar reviews… and terrible sales. 

Because sales had been disappointing, the publishers decided on a complete rebrand for the paperback edition. They went with this: 

(That’s a weird second-hand image, because – thank the Lord – my self-published books have now driven these original versions off the market so completely that they’ve become hard to find.) 

And that image still fails. There’s some sense of communication with the dead, yes, but in a séance-type way, not a weird-detective way. 

As a matter of fact, those cutesy suede ankle-boots suggest that what you’re looking at is some sort of women’s fiction based around séances. I mean: there probably IS a niche there, because there’s a niche for almost everything, but if you were a girly-séance sort of reader, you’d be totally put off when you found what kind of book was actually on offer. 

That book sold all across the United States and Canada… and sold fewer than a thousand copies: a figure so low I still find it staggering.  

Just because your eyes are probably hurting from the badness of those covers, here’s the self-pub version of the cover that replaced those two evildoers: 

That cover says: dark crime novel, with a theme to do with the borderline between life and death. That’s good enough: there just isn’t a visually one-stop way to express “murder story involving a detective who used to think she was dead.” 

The cover isn’t the pitch, remember: it’s the daughter of the pitch. You just need to see a strong family resemblance. 

That’s it from me. 

In Delightful Child News, I will just tell you that my elder daughter has created the most excellent word, confuzzling, for anything that is confusing and puzzling. It’s kind of a genius word, and I heartily recommend its adoption. 

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY is going on holiday...

As you probably know, we'll be doing some serious tinkering with Townhouse over the next couple of weeks. Our aim is to improve it for our members, both Premium and free - but that means it'll be going offline on Monday 28 July.

Feedback Friday is glad you folks will be getting a shiny new space to connect in, not least because it means she can have a well-deserved rest.

She'll be back on 8 August, slightly sunburnt, in her snazzy new home. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

The whole Jericho Writers team agrees that, at this year’s London Festival of Writing, our Friday Night Live competition was a little bit special. For a start, it was on a Saturday – but leaving the misnomer aside, we were bowled over by the stellar standard of the entries we received.

Anyone who was in the dining room that night would surely agree that our finalists – although writing in diverse genres – had one thing in common. Their work was accomplished, affecting and intriguing.

A month on, we wanted to reflect on what made our entrants’ best work so impressive and look at some of the more constructive feedback our judges had to offer.

What we loved

Strong opening lines

Giving your novel a killer first line sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not as simple as it might seem. Opening sentences shoulder immense pressure, often doing multiple things at once. They tell us something about our protagonist and the world they live in, hint at events that will be central to the story and strike a tone that will carry through the novel, setting up its genre and style.

We loved finalist Tori Howe’s arch, amusing line: “Our Christmas tree was definitely dead”, as well as Davina Bhanabhai’s devastating opener: “I spend my forty-fifth birthday identifying the dead body of my only child”.

Want to nail your own novel’s first line? Remember that this doesn’t have to be the bit of your book you write first! Hitting upon the perfect opening sentence is the sort of thing you might find easier to achieve in retrospect, when your draft is well underway and your characters and their world are firmly established.

Voice

What makes a strong narrative voice? It’s a question we get asked frequently, and – slightly annoyingly – the honest answer is you just know it when you read it.

Voice was something our Friday Night Live judges commented on frequently this year, highlighting the individuality and authenticity of many entrants’ writing. Sophie Holme’s entry, which made the live final, was a perfect example. Rich with wry wit, the first 500 words of her memoir are also shot through with a melancholy that hints at the darker themes her work explores – among them, the state of psychiatric care in the UK.

If you’re keen to develop your narrative voice, confidence is key. Know, right down to your bones, who your characters are, what the stakes are for them and how what happens in their world will shape them. Then you can tell their story with the sort of authority that resonates with readers – in a voice that, without needing to shout, demands their attention.

World-building... without info dumping

We had lots of fantastical, spooky and speculative entries to this year’s competition – and the best among them managed to establish the worlds their characters lived in without clumsily offloading key information. In her romantasy extract, finalist Isabel Norris made the smart move of drip-feeding just enough facts to let the reader orient themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, striking the perfect balance between providing details and provoking questions.

Friday Night Live winner Kate den Rooijen, in her speculative YA entry, achieved the same effect – allowing readers to conclude that her main character was dying at the same moment the protagonist realised this herself.

Things to think about

'Writing in'

Many of us do this, and it’s a very normal part of the writing process. For the uninitiated, ‘writing in’ is the act of producing scenes, or even whole chapters of a manuscript, whose (often unconscious) purpose is enabling you, the author, to work out who your characters are and what is going on with them.

The challenge is knowing when you’re writing in, and identifying those scenes or chapters as (gulp) potentially superfluous to the story you’re telling. Starting your novel in the right place is a skill – and to some extent it’s dependent on your ability to gauge how much ‘writing in’ content makes it into your final manuscript.

Our very best Friday Night Live entries this year boasted strong beginnings that took readers straight to the heart of action, setting, stakes and character, rather than explaining them. This is crucial for establishing a sense of pace and hooking your reader upfront.

Structure and style

We saw some Friday Night Live entries where judges praised “beautiful writing” but added that “the sentence structures chosen made it hard to follow”. In other cases, there was switching between tenses and points of view within extracts, which our judges found confusing.

Readers also said they found that, in a few cases, the genre of an entry didn’t quite tally with the style it was written in – often because the voice or narrative point of view felt jarring. It’s worth remembering that, if you’re writing a thriller, it needs to feel like a thriller from the very first page. Likewise, contemporary women’s fiction needs to open with a protagonist we can empathise with, in a setting readers will recognise. As one of today’s teenagers might put it: the vibes have to be right.

Over-writing

Finally, it’s no surprise that a small handful of our entries felt a little over-written. When you’re setting your work up to be judged, the temptation to keep embellishing it can be difficult to resist!

What is over-writing? It’s arguably a subjective concept, but it’s about using more words, more imagery and more bells and whistles than are needed. It can also be about making the same point in multiple ways when stating it simply would be more impactful.

Sometimes avoiding over-writing is about using one perfect word instead of five not-quite-right ones: getting to the heart of a feeling or experience in a way that feels true, rather than dressed up or manufactured.

Our advice? Don’t allow complex prose to obscure the point it’s supposed to be making. Ensure your words are meaningful, not just artfully arranged.

Our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to enter this year’s competition. It was a privilege to read your work, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with next year.

Something a little different this week.

I’ve jabbered a lot in the past about the importance of nailing your elevator pitch: making sure that your basic novel concept is one that people feel the need to pick up and explore.

I think that’s not just commercially important. I think it’s artistically important too. It’s key to any genuinely great book.

I’ve also always said that the elevator pitch – that basic concept – is FOR YOU. It’s a mother with 100 daughters. The daughters arise anywhere your book concept touches the world. So, for example:

• Your query letter
• Your book blurb
• A two-line pitch on social media
• A conversation with an agent at our London Festival of Writing.

But also, for example:

• Your text itself
• Your opening page (and what it hints at in terms of the future)
• Choices you make about what and what not to include.

But also: 

• Your book cover
• Your website
• Your Twitter profile (I’m not going to call that company by a stupid name just to please an erratic billionaire)
• Your Facebook ads (ditto). 

Today, I thought it would be interesting to pick up the very last of those. Here, for example, is a Facebook ad for one of the Fiona books.

What’s the elevator pitch for that book? Well, all my pitches have two layers, I guess. There’s the series pitch (“Detective who used to think she was dead”). And there’s the individual book pitch, which in this case is something like “Dark religion + kidnap + remote Wales village”. That’s the pitch if you pick out the central ingredients. If you want a more conventional pitch, then “Woman, wearing bridal white, found dead in a country churchyard. Who is she? And why is she here?” 

I hope you feel that the image above connects adequately with the pitch. It’s not that they say the exact same thing, but they live happily together – like lemon and mint.

Nearly all my ads use the same colour set – yellow and white text, dark monochrome image – because that basic mixture says noirish crime, with strong hints of seriousness. (Yellow and black together convey danger – it’s one of the standard colour sets of warning signs and crime tape.) Also, of course, the more consistency in the ads, the more casual users start to notice the brand on repeat viewings. 

Here’s another ad for the same book: 

That’s a more direct expression of the elevator pitch, but they’re both playing on the same basic turf. At the moment, both ads have roughly the same link click-through rate, so I can’t yet say which one will come out on top. 

Or take another example, this time for the ($0.99) series opener. 

Here, the elevator pitch is all about my damaged detective – who’s kinda nuts and used to think she was dead. The ad that’s worked best so far is this one: 

The actual image there is pretty much bog-standard: tough, crimey woman + moody landscape. But the ad text tells you who that woman is: “Brilliant, quirky, damaged, fascinating.” 

Again, that’s not a direct statement of the pitch, but it’s certainly a very clear echo. It makes you want to know more… and when you get to the actual book sales page, the basic offer expands from that exact starting point. The journey from ad to book page, to “look inside”, to purchase, should all be very clear, very consistent. 

Another ad that has done well is this one: 

That ad offers a landscape – a somewhat foreboding, Welsh-looking one. That establishes genre (moody, Celtic noir, crime), but it doesn’t say much directly about the pitch. But again, “Wales’ strangest detective” slaps the elevator pitch right there, up top. 

Both those ads have done better than one that uses a really positive review as its central element. Take this ad, for example: 

That ad has done OK… but it’s not been any kind of star performer. And I think that’s because its relationship with the elevator pitch is just too murky. OK, so Fiona Griffiths stars in some crime books. We’ve never met anyone like her. But… what? She’s super-girly? She’s a klutz? She’s half-robot? She speaks Ukrainian? She mostly works as a part-time hairdresser? 

In terms of ads that really deliver readers – that is, ads that command the user’s attention from first sight through to completion of purchase – it’s been my experience that the pitch matters. That’s why your original concept matters so much, even before you’ve started to write a word. It’s why that concept matters so much when you’re selling, not just with the text you deploy, but the image composition too. 

That’s it from me, my furry companion. May the grass lie softly for you and the air taste sweet. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY - Explanations 

Do you have any visual material for your book? If so, let’s hear your pitch and see your visuals. That’ll be fun! 

If you don’t have anything available yet (and you really don’t need to), then just give us your pitch and sketch out for us what a book cover or Facebook ad might look like.

When you're ready, log in and post yours here.

Til soon. 

Harry

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it’s like to be part of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

This month feels like a deeply personal and challenging one: we’re spending the month covering character, in all its facets. I have a theory that this aspect of writing is where the maxim, “Write what you feel,” comes most to the fore. I see myself and my experiences in every main character I’ve ever written, to a greater or lesser extent. I hear my values in their dialogue. I recognise the resonance of my soul in theirs and, to be perfectly honest, I can’t actually imagine writing stories in any other way.  

I’m not talking about writing characters that match only my characteristics, my physical attributes, my socio-economic categorisation, my place of birth or the places I’ve chosen to live in. For instance, the two main characters in the manuscript I’m writing on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme are, respectively, a male, 60-year-old, ex-special forces vagrant with PTSD, and a 20-year-old orphaned woman, living in a Suffolk commune. Both have significant powers of clairvoyancy.  

This, to probably nobody’s surprise, is not my actual life experience. No, what I mean is that I want to populate my stories with people who connect me to the commonality we all share: the frailty, the bravery, the drag of secret shame, the lift of delicate hope, our mortality and the knowing, innate within, that at some point this life will end. Beneath everything, I believe we’re not all that different to one another.  

I have another theory that the characters who arrive for each of us writers are embodiments of a particular, and highly personal, call to romantic adventure. The types of characters that turn up for me are an embodiment of what adventure means to me. They’re configured according to what my next lesson is, my next challenge. Us writers, us artists, us humans – we’re not built for safety. I reckon we’re built for lives of progress and questing! The characters that have gathered in my imagination across the years are not mere chance or some random coincidence – they mean something to me. In pursuing them, getting to know them across the one-hundred-thousand or so words I write, as I carefully observe them, record their actions and reactions, I am changing myself. My hope is that I am skilled enough to render them accurately, such that the spirit of adventure is a shared one – recognised in the hearts and imaginations of readers.  

I asked my writer-friends how their characters came to them. They spoke of their characters becoming great friends, of feeling shy of them at first, of falling in love with them. They even spoke of writing them as a form of magical possession; of being inhabited by a spirit who wishes to be known, sketched and seen. I love that idea. 

Aren’t the best books, the ones that stay with us, comprised of characters who we recognise in some way? There's a relatability to them, their humanity playing out in ways that make it easier to identify ourselves in all our perfection and limitations. It was always a book that enabled me to put words to a particular feeling or emotion. Penny-drop moments of concentrated complexity can be delivered in a sentence or two, like a light going on: “Oh, that’s it!”  

My final theory, therefore, is that it’s only books that can deliver this straight-to-the-point, I-get-it feeling. Paintings can move, sculpture can awe, music can inspire, films can amuse. But the written story is the sharpest, truest, longest-lived art form.  

Why? Because stories feature people in close-up, specific focus (no matter what narrative/psychic distance the author wields) and, being constructed of words on a page, they require complex focus and brainwork to read. Imagination takes effort, or sustained cognitive engagement, as the men in white coats might say. For this reason alone, it behoves us writers to come up with the most compelling, intriguing, daring (in all forms of courageous thought and action) characters we can muster – as a gift to both our own growth, but also to our readers. And where else better to go so wholly into the practical aspects of your story and your characters than right here on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme?  

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

Last week, we looked at a couple of solo flights – characters brought to life only from their dialogue or only from their interior reflection.

But that’s not mostly how stories go. Mostly, we have a point of view character through whom we meet others. So what we get is character-through-character. The reader interprets the third party character from what the point-of-view character is reporting – but that interpretation always takes into account who’s telling the story.

That all sounds slightly academic, but it’s not really – it’s normal human. Suppose I find there is chocolate cake mess all over my kitchen, and some story about a dog jumping up and scoffing it. Well, fine – but my understanding of what’s happened will depend rather a lot on whether my wife is telling the story … or a very chocolatey 6-year-old.

So here’s a chunk of action – narrated by dear old Fiona – in which she interacts with a woman named Anna Quintrell.

The scene is set in a two-custody cell in a modern custody suite. Quintrell is an accountant who’d been busted for something bad. Fiona has been working undercover, but Quintrell doesn’t know that and still thinks Fiona was part of her gang. Fiona has a visible face injury which she acquired on purpose – she wanted to look the part. She’s asked that the custody cell be made as cold as possible.

Here’s the scene, a complete (but very short) chapter:

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

And that’s it. The scene is so simple that, in a way, there’s not much to say about it.

The central element here is the establishment of a power hierarchy. When they were both in the criminal gang, Quintrell was Fiona’s boss. She was taller, richer, more educated (she thought), more powerful. In here, though, that’s all inverted.

A cutsie summer dress is replaced by a grey fleece. The resources people fight over aren’t elegant homes (a contest where Quintrell won, but prison-issue blankets (a contest where Fiona wins 3-1.)

There are only two scraps of non-blanket related dialogue. The first is the bit about Fiona’s injury.

She tells Quintrell she was hurt once ‘resisting arrest’ – that is, she claims she fought the police who tried to arrest her. And part of the injury was after arrest, meaning that she was beaten up during interrogation. That’s not true – Fiona and the reader know it’s not true – but

1. It makes Quintrell even more scared about her situation and
2. It makes Fiona look even scarier to Quintrell, because she gets beaten up by cops and doesn’t even seem that perturbed by it.

The other non-blanket related moment is Quintrell saying, ‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

That’s Quintrell looking at total defeat – a prison sentence stretching ahead of her. But it’s also a frightened woman reaching out to someone who might be a friend. It’s a request for sympathy.

That request gets yet another shrug. So far Quintrell has received from Fiona:

1. A stare
2. A blanket
3. A ‘fuck off’
4. Two shrugs.

That’s not really much of a basis for friendship, so Quintrell who is imprisoned and cold and facing jail is now also friendless.

Nothing at all has happened in this scene, except that: ‘Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered.’

 That moment of crying is the bit Fiona has been working to achieve. In the morning, when they wake, Fiona shows a tiny bit of openness to friendship. Here’s a tiny snippet from the chapter that follows:

Quintrell trusts my legend [=undercover identity] completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Fiona gives Quintrell a blanket and says something nice about her dress. That’s the nudge that Quintrell needs to turn all confessional. She starts spilling her heart out to Fiona … unaware that the whole thing is being recorded. She ends up incriminating herself and most of her fellow gang-members.

And throughout all this, we always learn more about Quintrell, but always through a Fiona-ish lens. A Jack Reacher type character might have noted the dress – roughly: “she wore a blue and white summer dress” – but wouldn’t have got involved with it.

A more feminine type character might have started to characterise the dress a bit more. (“A summer dress, but smart, almost nautical. A dress that wanted to hold a glass of cold white wine overlooking some sunny beachfront in the Hamptons.”)

Fiona is feminine enough to circle back to Quintrell’s clothes, but in a Fiona-ish way – ‘if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses …’

So every time we learn something about Quintrell, we also learn something about Fiona. And in fact, because Fiona’s undercover, we understand Fiona herself at two levels: the Fiona she’s pretending to be, and the Fiona she really is.

Last week, I said that our two masters of fiction worked via (i) putting some real unpredictability into their characters and (ii) letting us, the reader, figure out what’s going on.

The scene we’ve looked at today involves two people not one, so the focus is always shared.

But the same basic rule applies.

Keep the scene unpredictable. Here, the scene gets its tension in part because we know that Fiona isn’t actually a horrible cow. She’s someone who normally would share her blankets or comfort a woman in distress. So we keep sort of expecting her to do just that. But she doesn’t. She keeps the blankets and tells woman-in-distress to fuck off.

Fiona’s a joy to write in part because she brings her own built-in unpredictability. You have to pay close attention to the scene, because (this is Fiona) you just aren’t sure what’ happening next.

And: don’t explain.

There’s basically no explanation for the reader at all in the parts I’ve just quoted. A little further on, though, we get this:

I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

And she tells me.

Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

That last paragraph is the first time that Fiona explains anything to the reader. But (and I think this is a pretty good rule in fiction) that the explanation is only given, once the reader already (kind of) knows it. (If you’re explaining how custody suites work or rules around covert recording, that’s different. I’m talking here about character/emotional type explanations.)

In effect, what Fiona is doing here is simply voicing something that the reader has already figured out.

So the reader brain is doing something like this: “Wow, Fiona is being a real cow. And blimey, Quintrell looks defeated. Oh, she’s crying now. And what’s this? Fiona’s being a little bit nice this morning. Bet Quintrell needs that. And – aha! – Fiona’s now basically inviting Quintrell to confess to everything. She really shouldn’t do that, but I can see she’s absolutely going to.”

All that Fiona is doing with her ‘urge to confess’ paragraph is wrapping that already-existing understanding up into a nice little package, so the reader-brain can dock that bit of knowledge and move on.

Always with these emails, I learn what I think by writing the email.

So, honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find today, but I think this last lesson is the big one. It’s OK to explain something character-related to the reader … but you need to only do that once the reader already basically knows. You’re drawing a line under something so you can move on, but the reader needs to have done the work for themselves first.

Here endeth the lesson.

And if you find yourself in a cell with Fiona, then keep your mouth shut – and your blankets close.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

Interesting one today. I want you to find a place in your text where you explain something about character X. Does the reader already kind of know what you’re saying, or not? Why is the explanation here. Find a 300 word chunk and tell us your thoughts.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

Crime readers are a discerning bunch and if you asked a hundred what draws them to the genre, I’d put money on the words “pace” and “tension” topping most lists. You can have a beautifully constructed plot with an exquisitely satisfying ending – but unless you keep the reader promising themselves just one more chapter, your efforts will be wasted. 

Pacy, gripping crime fiction is hard to sustain over 80k plus words. It’s both exhausting and cruel to the reader to try to achieve it by writing fight after car chase after clifftop shootout. Plot and action can’t do all the lifting, so here are three lower-octane aspects of writing that will keep the screws turning… 

Character 

In the words of acclaimed US author Dennis Lehane, ‘You create a bunch of characters and let them bounce into one another. That’s how a good story happens.’  

But how? First, set your protagonist and antagonists up so the reader will care about (not necessarily like) them.  

• What kind of person are they?  

• What do they want most in life?  

• What would they kill / die for?  

• What are their secrets?  

• How do they justify their behaviour to themselves and others? 

• Why are they and their opponents such adversaries?  

• Why does the fight / journey / case mean so much to them?  

• What are their redeeming / damning features? 

Now, use every opportunity to set up conflict between them. That doesn’t mean them brawling every time they meet – but keep ratcheting up the stakes. Make your antagonist dump impossible jeopardy on your protagonist time and again, culminating in the mother of all showdowns. 

Your cast will not only carry the story, they are the story. It’s not the events themselves that matter, but the impact each has on your main characters: both in the moment, and as their arcs, and that of your story, progress. 

Setting 

You don’t even need people to up the ante. One of the most beautiful crime novels I’ve read this year is All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.  

In this scene, Saint, a young girl, ventures into the wilderness in a last-ditched effort to rescue her kidnapped friend, Patch. Without once mentioning how she feels, Whitaker lets the setting do all the work:  

She checked her map a dozen times before she found a hard yellow sign. CAUTION MINIMUM MAINTENANCE ROAD LEVEL B SERVICE ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.…A tractor sprayed with mud, its scoop left buried in the dirt. The track fed the mouth of woodland so dense she slowed as possum haw leaves slid to a gulley… Saint splashed through a stream crossing, her sneakers soon filled with the brace of cold. … above ravens watched her like prey. At the first fall of rain she looked through a canopy that stammered light as wind parted it.  

For me this is the gold standard of conjuring terror through setting. Vivid descriptions peppered with metaphors of abandonment – ‘the scoop left buried in the dirt’ – and fear – ‘her sneaker filled with the brace of cold’. These are images to die for, in my humble crime writing opinion. 

Take how Stevenson, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, through the rise then fall of the fog, evokes incredible eeriness as Mr Utterson travels to find Hyde, wanted for murder: 

The fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling. 

Dialogue 

We all know to ‘show, not tell’ where appropriate, and dialogue is one of the strongest ways of vividly moving a plot on. Without info dumping, by using character traits and speech patterns you can build tension, create conflict and even craft legendary scenes (remember the ‘You can’t handle the truth’ courtroom exchange in A Few Good Men?)  

Some great tips for dramatic dialogue are to: 

• Create and sustain subtext through unspoken thoughts and memorable lines 

• Build conflict, remembering less is more so avoid melodrama 

• Avoid niceties and fillers; make every line count 

• Reveal something new, however small, in each passage 

• Use action to underline meaning and drama 

• End on a dramatic high. 

The key to great dialogue is authenticity and differentiation. If you can hear your characters’ distinct voices, as if they’re people actually speaking and sparking off one another, you have the makings of a thrilling scene with escalating tension that races the story along. 

Throughout the Jericho Writers’ Crime and Thriller Course, we study all these techniques. It’s fascinating how the students adapt to applying the principles and examples we focus on, and how dramatic their stories become as a result.  

Try them for yourself and see how they work for you. 

The internet is practically bursting with content on the writing routines of best-selling authors. But these writers already make a living from the craft. Their schedules often feel completely different from those of aspiring debut authors, who might be juggling a day job and caring for dependents while trying to find any spare moment to write. So, is a writing routine necessary – and if so, how can it be tailored to suit you? 

A novel (or non-fiction book) for adults is roughly 80,000 words long. To complete a draft in a year, you'd need to achieve an output of 6,650 words a month (or 1,500 words a week). Viewed like this, the task doesn’t seem insurmountable. And there’s nobody saying you have to finish that first draft in twelve months, either. This is where establishing a writing routine comes in. 

Below, I’ve looked at the writing routines of some of my aspiring debut clients, alongside those of well-known authors: 

Fawzia (aspiring debut): “I have three hours a week to write. That’s it. I’m a mum to two young children and I tell myself I’ll write in the evenings, but I’m too fried. My three-hour stint (when the kids are in childcare) is gold dust. Although it doesn’t amount to a huge word-count, it’s all I’ve got. Without that time, I’d go mad!” 

The famous author: Haruki Murakami rises early, and runs and swims at intervals to break up his desk time. In his words, “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”  

Claudia (aspiring debut): “My kids are at school full-time. I teach part time, so I manage to dedicate one day a week to writing. I start as soon as the house is empty and leave everything, including housework and lesson planning, until after the kids are home. I’m not a slave to wordcount because I can’t be. I just have to ringfence this time, and use it as best I can.” 

The famous author: Jodi Picoult starts her narratives already knowing the conclusion, then works backwards to find out how to get there. Jodi’s approach to writing is that it’s a ‘proper’ job and requires an 8-hour day.   

Andreas (aspiring debut): “I live alone. I’m lucky to be able to write during the day, and schedule my paid work in the evenings. I’ve so far turned out an impressive word-count on a weekly basis, but often it’s sketchy and gets deleted and rewritten. But so long as I’m writing, I’m trying my best, even if it’s a long-term work-in-progress.” 

The famous author: Kate Mosse explains, “For me, the writing comes at the very end of the preparation and planning, which might take four or five years. When I write, I start very early in the day – maybe 4 o’clock – with a cup of strong, sweet black coffee and my tiny laptop… I then write for, say, seven/eight hours a day, before disappearing off for a walk or a swim or anything that keeps the old bones moving. After that, a quiet evening with the family… ready to begin again the next morning.” 

Padraig (aspiring debut): “Now the kids have grown and flown, I reserve Saturdays for writing. I guard my Saturdays jealously (it’s become a bit of a family joke). I don’t care how slowly I write, so long as I can keep working on my book that sacred one day a week.” 

The famous author: David Mitchell notes, “I could probably write for ten hours a day if I had them, but I’ve got two young children, so I can either be a halfway decent dad or I can be a writer who writes all day. I can’t really be both. As things stand, I might clock in three hours on a poor day, and six or seven on a productive day. Sometimes… I forget the time until my long-suffering wife begins to drop noisy hints.”  

The final words must go to Kate Mosse, because her writing routine advice fits any lifestyle or circumstance: “Five minutes a day are better than no minutes. You might not yet have time to write that ‘big’ novel you’ve been planning, but everyone – whatever their responsibilities for working, caring, life – can find five minutes a day. Keep a pad and paper by the kettle… or send text messages to yourself. Look at people in the street and think of how you’d put them on the page with just three words… when you do have time to write, you’ll be match fit and ready to go.” 

Four Tips for Establishing Your Writing Routine: 

• Decide when (and how long) you can write for each week 

• Set a ‘time-aside’ goal, or a wordcount goal – and be realistic!  

• Be kind to yourself – sometimes life gets in the way 

• Give yourself time off, too.  

You know how gifted artists can suggest a face – and a mood, a character, a personality – in just a few swift lines?

Well, writers can do the same. So today’s email is just a “stand and admire” type affair. Two writers. Two vastly different techniques. But some surprising commonalities in the way they work…

Dialogue with Big El

How about this from Elmore Leonard:

'Man, all the photographers, TV cameras. This shit is big news, has everybody over here to see it. Otherwise, Sunday, what you have mostly are rich ladies come out with their little doggies to make wee-wee. I mean the doggies, not the ladies.' A girl in front of them smiled over her shoulder and Ordell said, 'How you doing, baby? You making it all right?' He looked past her now, glanced at Louis to say, 'I think I see him,' and pushed through the crowd to get closer to the street. 'Yeah, there he is. Black shirt and tie? A grown-up skinhead Nazi. I call him Big Guy. He likes that.'

'It's Richard,' Louis said. 'Jesus.'

The speaker is a guy called Ordell. This is the second page of Rum Punch, so the reader has no prior knowledge of the character. But that little paragraph? It says so much. It says:

1. He talks a kind of cool, urban tough guy English – which is just about right. He’s a ruthless blackmarket operator in LA.
2. At the same time, “with their little doggies to make wee-wee”? Huh? What? This is such an unexpected turn of phrase, we don’t quite know what to do with it. I think, for me, this is sign of a kind of unpredictability. If the guy was angry with you and happened to have a gun in his hand, you’d have no idea which way he was about to leap.
3. And sure enough, it’s straight from that highly unexpected phrase to a very standard pick-up type line (“How you doing, baby?”). From a white power march to doggies making wee to a very basic pick-up line. Our heads are spinning.
4. And then, we get to the point of the scene: “There he is. Black shirt and tie. A grown-up skinhead Nazi.” And oh, OK, we readjust again. Forget the pretty girls. Forget the doggie wee-wees. We’re hunting Nazis. And Nazis are bad, right? No one loves a Nazi. Plus, we assume correctly that Ordell is Black, and so he surely really really doesn’t like Nazis.
5. Only then, yet another switcheroo: “I call him Big Guy. He likes that.” And again: huh? Why are we making nice with skinhead Nazis? Why is Ordell, of all people doing so?

The whole paragraph is barely 100 words, but it’s told us so much already about Ordell – and already locked us into the story, because we know that anything involving Ordell and Nazi Big Guy is going to involve violence and a lot of unpredictability and fireworks.

Big El’s tips for humans:

1. Throw unpredictability into your dialogue. Steer one way, then abruptly somewhere different.
2. Let the dialogue do character description for you. Leonard doesn’t need to tell us that Ordell is highly sexed and ready to try it on with pretty much anyone. He just writes 9 words of dialogue and leaves us to figure it out.

Interior Monologue, with Mrs Robinson

Here is a completely opposite technique from Marilynne Robinson – a technique so opposite, that Elmore Leonard would never use it:

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little.

No dialogue here. It’s all interior reflection. And John Ames, the narrator here, is about as far from Ordell as you could possibly imagine.

But we have the same themes at play here:

1. Real unpredictability. Here, the narrator surprises us by telling us that people are asking him (a person who’s alive) what it’s like to be dead. Then he surprises us further, by telling us that elderly people would ask him that even when he was young. Then he comes up with what is maybe a somewhat expected line about going home… but then thwarts that by saying we have no home in the world… before going on to talk about what might actually be the homiest thing in the world, namely a fried egg sandwich and coffee and radio.
2. Let the interior monologue do the character work for you. In just the same way as regular dialogue for Elmore Leonard, Marilynne Robinson doesn’t bother to tell us much about her character. She just lets him narrate and forces the reader to draw inferences.

I was originally going to pick a third novelist to compare as well, but I’m intrigued enough by the basis similarity in approach here – unpredictability plus a lot of reliance on the reader figuring things out for themselves – that I wanted to see how I approach the same  issues.

And – well, it’s complicated. I write first person as Fiona and, yes, Fiona is notably unnpredictable right from her actions through to her word choices. She doesn’t explain herself much. She just is, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. So in terms of my approach with Fiona, I guess I operate on largely the same lines as the two models here.

But when it comes to Fiona encountering other characters, something a bit more complicated is going on. We’ll look at that next week.

In the meantime, it’s time for…

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Give me any chunk (100-200 words max; we want short) that shows deep characterisation in a few swift lines. Look for unpredictability and a reliance on the reader’s own intelligence. It’s going to be interesting to see what you come up with.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry