Our Articles

With the deadline for our First 500 competition rapidly approaching, the Jericho Writers team is hard at work reading every single one of your entries... Twice!

Getting to enjoy such a wide variety of work is a real perk of the job – but it’s also set us thinking about the array of different things readers look for in the first few pages of a novel.

Here, we’ve compiled some words of wisdom from Team JW that will help you shine up the opening of your work-in-progress. They’re perfectly timed if you’re yet to enter First 500 but still intend to – don’t forget the deadline is 30 November.

Character and point of view

Almost every member of the Jericho Writers team mentioned the importance of helping readers connect with character in the first 500 words of your novel. Senior Courses Assistant Verity says: “I'm looking for a character I'm going to want to stay with for the whole story – and they don't have to be a good person! Show me something of who they are through how they interact with their setting, and through their dialogue – don't simply tell me.”

Senior Marketing Executive Tanya adds: “I love it when a character shows a bit of vulnerability or their slightly messy, less likeable side. It feels real and I can't look away.”

Establishing point of view is also critical in your opening pages, as Becca, Head of Marketing and Membership, explains: “It’s essential that your reader roughly understands who they’re following and what’s going on. Starting with a massive action scene, for example, isn't always the best, because as a reader I don't yet know which character I'm supposed to care about or why. If there isn't enough grounding, you risk the reader either being totally confused or simply not caring about what happens in your exciting opening.”

Kate, our People & Services Team Leader, concurs: “I want to feel what the character is feeling, while still getting a sense of the plot that’s beginning to drive the story forward.” Meanwhile Cleo, Writer Support Assistant and the newest member of Team JW, says: “I want to see and feel what's happening, through the protagonist's eyes. I want to be on their side right from the outset.”

Genre and orientation

Writer Support and Courses Assistant Imogen argues that readers also need a sense of the type of story you’re telling. “A clear sense of genre is crucial,” she says, “whether you're writing YA fantasy or literary fiction. Although we ask First 500 entrants to state the genre they’re writing in, I typically read the extract first and then check back to see if my impression of the genre was correct.”

If there’s a clear mismatch, Imogen explains, “that’s usually a sign that the writer needs to hone their voice and consider their intentions for the manuscript. But remember that demonstrating your genre usually doesn't mean leaning into tropes from the get-go! It instead means confidence with tone and situating the reader within the story clearly.”

Action, originality and intrigue

While you could be forgiven for thinking every member of the team advises a cautious, considered approach to openings, you’d be wrong. Jonny, our Campaigns Executive, says: “I’m already assuming the sea is stormy, the rain is heavy, and the main character is having an awful day. Don’t waste a whole paragraph on this – I want to dive straight into the action.”

Kat, our Head of Courses and Mentoring, wants writing that feels different: “I’m looking for a truly original concept brought to life with exceptional writing. Something that makes me think, Wow.”

Rachel, our Writer Support Executive (and woman on the inside of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme!) wants a fairytale-style path to follow whenever she starts a new book. “I’m looking for ‘sweets’,” she explains, “something intriguing and slightly unexplained - and I want a trail of them on the first page. I’m after one or two moments that leave me wondering, 'How's this going to turn out?’.”

The First 500 Novel Competition is all about your opening 500 words… the start of a story that could go on to captivate readers, agents, and publishers alike. You can enter with any genre, memoir, or non-fiction project. This year’s winner will receive a prize worth more than £8000, including a fully funded place on the Jericho Writers Novel Writing Course. Visit our First 500 page to find out more and submit your entry now!

So –

I was about to hold forth on Purpose –

Which is a very good topic and one that absolutely no one talks about enough including me –

And I was all nicely settled. Trip to the gym: done. Child to piano exam: done. Dog walk: done. Tea to hand: yes. Dog settled: oh yessity-yes. But –

A noise from the kitchen, as of things being tipped over and nuts being stolen –

Which means that Raf the Squizzel has come in through his squizzel flap and is choosing to steal from us over the hard graft of finding nuts in the rain outside. And –

Raf (or Rafe?) is welcome to his nuts of course, but there is a 0% chance –

And I do mean a big fat zero, no “point anythings” to be seen –

That Dibble will be content to lie next to me and lick his paws when there is squizzeling going on in the next room –

And, what is as much to the point, Raf doesn’t just like the nuts, he likes to run up and down on me, infuriating the dog, and happily jumping around on the keyboard as a way to ensure that my attention is on him not on the damn screen, and if I can hear Raf, he can hear me, and will come a-calling very soon –

But –

You thought this was a story of Doom and Despair – a tale of Failure – but it is not. I snuck my way to the kitchen door –

Ninja-like, you say? A human stealth-weapon –?

Well, maybe so, yes, perhaps there was a touch of the ninjas, but no headband. I don’t look cool in a headband –

And I closed the damn door. Dog, tea and laptop on this side. Nut-stealing squizzel on the other.

Phew. Done. Ready.

So: Purpose.

Why do we write? Why do I? Why do you?

Well, yes, we like it. And yes, we hope to make some readers happy. And maybe if we make enough readers happy, we’ll make some money  and get those other things – festival appearances and the like – which seem like part of the picture.

But the book. Your story.

What is its purpose, please? I wonder if there is a single good book anywhere that isn’t importantly purpose-driven.

What do I mean? Well, Philip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials trilogy with an explicit anti-church message. (Or at least, an anti-authority message: PP wants a world where people get to think for themselves, make their own decisions.)

That purpose gave the book a heft that just didn’t come from any number of polar bears or cliff ghasts or even daemons wandering through Oxford colleges.

Any really good book has that heft, I think. It can be massively explicit – as with Philip Pullman or (even more so) with To Kill a Mockingbird, or pretty much everything by Toni Morrison.

It can certainly be personal rather than political. You can’t read The Spy who Came In From the Cold without thinking (rightly) that Le Carre had something big to say about love and betrayal in a time of cold war. And in fact you might think that the cold war was really only a backdrop, or even, in effect, a metaphor for something personal. Perhaps Le Carre would have thought the same way about love and betrayal even if he lived in a world full of hippies throwing flowers at each other.

It can also be ambiguous or very deeply hidden. Does Raymond Chandler have big points to make about his world of 1940s Los Angeles? Well, maybe, but if he does, those points are deeply buried. (I think RC wants to talk about what it is to be good, or even noble, in a modern, urban, capitalist world. But, in RC’s view, the modern world doesn’t really admit notions of nobility, so neither RC nor his narrator can openly address the subject – so all the reader gets, or appears to get, is silence.) Plenty of other books have a very strong sense of purpose, but one so tightly suppressed that it’s never really disclosed. Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn would be the poster-child for not talking about its subject.

But what does all this mean for you?

I don’t think you can glue purpose onto a book. You can be authentic, or nothing.

A lot of action-type stories just start with a hero presumed to be good (a Tom Cruise type) and an enemy who’s definitely bad (which you know because they have some facial or verbal peculiarity and because they say scary things to do with bombs.) And that’s it. The machinery of plot just operates without the whole good/bad thing ever getting really investigated any further.

But any plot always throws up complications and loose ends and the like. How do you deal with those? How does your hero or heroine?

In one of the Fiona books, Fiona solves a long-past missing persons case by figuring out that the person – widely presumed to have been murdered – is in fact alive and well and living near Bournemouth. Job done, right?

And yes: her job was done in the sense that she’d arrested all the actual bad guys and cleared up all the mysteries that she started with.

Except, the missing girl had a dad, who missed her profoundly and whose life had run into the sands – or at least, the gloopy Welsh mud equivalent of those sands.

So what does an authentically good police officer do in those circumstances? Well, without much talking about it, over the course of the book, Fiona had coaxed and cajoled the man to clean up his house – and his life. She’s nudged him into becoming the man his daughter would have wanted him to be. And, that done, Fiona gets the dad in a car, drives him down to the south coast, makes him buy some yellow tulips, and plonks him outside the door of the house where his daughter now lives.

That sounds like a good way to establish Fiona’s above-and-beyond sense of morality. It’s not enough, not for her, to crack open a crime ring. She has to do what she can to put together the lives that have been broken.

Forget the cat

There’s a famous (and quite useful) book on screenwriting, Save the Cat. The title comes from an idea that to establish a character’s fundamental decency, you want to have them save a cat from some kind of trouble early in the story.

But I think (at least with novels) this is basically nonsense.

It feels so glued on, so inauthentic.

The thing about Fiona and her farmer and the yellow tulips is that, by this point in the book, we feel that this is absolutely something she would do. Not just that: but the whole business of getting the old guy down to the south coast isn’t something we rush past in the opening pages of the book: it takes up precious page space at the very end. Because those pages are the book’s finale, they have an aura that none of the others do. So Fiona commits, and the reader feels that the author has committed, and the little bit of purpose – some statement about what it is to be noble in our world – feels authentic.

And that’s it: the message for the day. Does your book have authentic purpose? It’s fine (and probably good, in fact) if you can’t precisely define what that purpose is. But can you feel it? Is it there? It probably should be. Your book will be better if it is.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Purpose

Purpose – that’s something very tricky to show in a 250-word passage, but let’s give it a go. Feel free to edit a longer passage to get it down to the right kind of length. Give us enough explanation to understand the context. And just show us something that hints at the point of your writing. This could be really subtle. It doesn’t have to show your character being good. It could be (say) about the difficulty of belonging to two worlds (the themes of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.) Just show us something to suggest why you’ve written the book. When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

250 words or so. Title & context. Go for it. I’ve put a chunk of that Fiona ‘n’ tulip stuff below, so you know what I mean.

Til soon.

Harry

Ever read the first few lines of a story and just had to keep going? That's exactly what the First 500 Novel Competition is all about. It's a celebration of those opening 500 words that hook us, pull us in, and leave readers desperate to read one more page.

Last year, we had over 1,000 writers throw their stories into the ring, and wow some of those first 500 words were unforgettable. But don’t just take it from us. Let’s hear from some of last year’s finalists. They’ll tell you what it was like to enter, what they learned, and how those first few hundred words changed their writing game.

Spoiler: it might just inspire you to finally hit send on your own entry.

Mike Murray, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

"There are so many writing competitions that it's difficult to know which ones suit you and your work. Finding ones that help you grow as a writer is key. The thing about the Jericho Writer's Opening 500 words competition is that it's free to enter if you're a Premium Member but the discipline it requires is why I enter each year. Working to a deadline, studying previous finalist entries, and any published novel, the task is clear, how can you make your novel opening stand out.

I'm lucky enough to have been a finalist and this then challenged me to read my work live to the Jericho Writers audience, a rare development opportunity. Being a finalist is a confidence-building exercise, and persistence pays off. I'm a better writer for simply entering, and a more confident one for doing well. 

Go enter!"

Kelly Jackson, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

"When I entered Jericho’s First 500, I didn’t expect to get anywhere. I saw it as an incentive to polish my first chapter, a learning experience. I thought, 'If I don’t enter, I’ll never know.' Plus, as a JW member, it was free to enter, a no-brainer really.

When the email arrived saying I was a finalist, I was so happy that anyone would have thought I’d just won an Oscar. Writing can be such a solitary thing; you convince yourself no one will care about your words. And then suddenly, someone does. That tiny bit of recognition changed everything. It wasn’t about winning; it was the strange, wonderful thrill of knowing my words had actually made someone feel something.

At the finals, I read my excerpt to a panel of judges, including literary agents. How often does a debut author get that kind of captive audience? That alone was priceless. Plus, their feedback is now proudly quoted in my query letter.

Being a finalist pushed me to take myself seriously as a writer. To anyone hesitating to enter: please do it. You’ve already done the hard part by putting words on the page; now let someone see them."

Richard Martin, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

"I was a finalist in 2024 and the whole experience was immensely positive and rewarding. To read my work out alongside the other talented, supportive writers felt like a big honour, and then to receive feedback from not only the agents on the panel but other authors who had entered the competition was really special. Reaching the final gave me the impetus to push on with ‘China Doll’ and believe in it, and I am now coming towards the end of the first draft and looking to submit to agents early next year."

Michelle Sanchez, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

“Writing contests have become an addiction of mine, and I love talking about them with other authors! My first contest win occurred when I was still drafting my Gothic horror manuscript, and having strangers select my novel as best in the YA category boosted my confidence and motivated me to complete that novel. My most recent contests included becoming a finalist in the 2024 Jericho Writer’s First 500 and The Caledonia Novel Award—which led to additional interest before I signed with my literary agent. If you are an author trying to decide if you should submit to Jericho Writer’s First 500, my short answer is, “Yes! Do it!” because writing contests grew my confidence as an author, helped me polish my first pages, provided valuable feedback on my submission, and placed my work in front of publishing professionals. You never know what could happen, but even making a longlist is an accomplishment to pad the bio portion of your query letter. Submitting your work shows you are brave, determined, and resilient—all important traits of successful authors!”

The First 500 Novel Competition isn’t just about winning prizes (though there are some pretty amazing ones). It’s about seeing what your writing can do, getting feedback from real-life pros, and being part of a community that gets how nerve-wracking and exciting those first pages can be.

So, what are you waiting for? November’s your chance to put your first 500 words out into the world. Who knows? Those words could be the start of something amazing. Your story is waiting let’s see what it can do!

I said last week that:

“If you’re writing realistic, adult novels, you can’t just wave your hands at all [the technicalities]. You need some measure of accuracy. That’s not really because your readership is going to know all about sub-sea cable repair. It’s more that your writing won’t smell authentic unless it’s deeply rooted in reality. The more you discover about the reality, the more you’ll find details which seem utterly compelling.”

Every now and then I say things like that, thinking that they feel roughly true – then wonder afterwards, is that really true, though?

I did, in fact, spend significant time trying to figure out the whole business of cable repair and the like. I think that if a proper expert read my text, they wouldn’t have huge problems with it. (I once wrote a book about the early oil industry and the head of BP, who had a deep knowledge of early oil-drilling technology, wrote to tell me that I’d done a pretty good job. Phew!)

But could I have just skipped the research? Could I have made stuff up and written just as good a book? I mean: I’d risk annoying a handful of cable-repair engineers, but that’s a pretty small sub-group of readers. For everyone else: does the accuracy really matter?

Well, let’s take a look.

Establishing trust

The first real block of text that feels research-y is this one – a quotation from a (fictional) expert report on a suspect vessel:

Gantry

The gantry is of sufficient height and width to launch/retrieve a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) but, as originally configured, the gantry’s positioning would have risked collisions between any ROV and the existing stern ramp, thereby potentially damaging ROV. Gantry has been visibly adapted to locate suitable handling equipment further aft, including an A-frame style pulley system which is not required for ordinary fishing purposes. Note also cabling to stern winch mounting, implying possible existence of a tether management system (TMS) …

Now that’s boring. It’s kind of meant to be boring – the author is a marine consultant and the text needs to sound appropriate.

But notice the nouns: gantry, ROV, stern ramp, handling equipment, A-frame pulley system, cabling, stern winch. Those nouns say to the reader, “We’re in technical territory here. This stuff is firmly rooted in engineering reality.”

What’s more, the nouns convey that message even if the reader slightly glazes over at the details. “Blah blah gantry … blah blah, stern ramp … blah blah, cabling – yes, OK, I believe that you know what you’re talking about.”

I honestly doubt that I could have generated that list of nouns through my own invention. In my case, at least, I needed to spend time poking around on shipping websites and the like. But the result of that research? Getting the reader’s buy-in for my project. That’s still rather emotionless, of course – this is dry, abstract material – but I’m carrying the reader with me. They trust me on the topic of fishing vessels and Remote Operated Vehicles. For now, that’s all I need.

Establishing character-in-setting

As the novel proceeds, I get my character on board ship. She’s taken a job as a ship’s cook, pretending to have had experience, when in fact she has none. She’s also a terrible cook. Here’s her welcome on board:

So Honnold nods. Holds out a lean hand. Says, ‘Welcome aboard,’ and shows me brusquely to my tiny berth below decks.

I stow my bag. Take my pots and pans to the galley. Get used to the clamps that hold the cooking equipment stable. Go down to the holds. The giant freezers which will store the catch as it comes in. The ice-maker, which will make as much ice as those fish, and those freezers, need. The room-sized freezer compartment which holds food for the voyage. Boxloads of it, mostly heat and serve.

This has more flavour, because it’s in Fiona’s voice and Fiona herself is navigating the world being described. The nouns are still really significant in establishing place: berth, galley, clamps [for holding pots and pans steady in high seas], freezers, ice-maker.

That phrase ‘room-sized freezer compartment’ draws the reader’s attention to the fact that this is a real ship! Catching real fish! And the volumes they expect are so large that they need a freezer as big as a room! Now, OK, maybe that’s too many exclamation marks, but the point is real. The research gives me the nouns; the nouns convey a depth of authenticity; that authenticity then starts generating mood and atmosphere and (still at a low-level here) excitement.

I don’t want to suggest that the research and the technical-type nouns are all that you need. They’re not. You also want stuff like this:

A rattle of anchor chain and the deep bass of the ship’s diesel. Honnold on the bridge and navigation lamps showing.

Blue water to port and starboard.

Water, and two huge oil refineries. Towers, pipes, tanks. Brightening silver in the dull light.

Dyfed-Powys can’t see me now and I stand on deck, watching the land slide past.

Or this:

The land has vanished. We are travelling on sea the colour of wet rock. Of light falling on slate. Waves trouble the surface and a steady breeze rakes ripples into the broader swell. Our trail is marked out in a white that vanishes as you watch.

My gaze keeps reaching for the world’s rim. Looking for a glimpse of land, an anchor.

Nothing technical there, but we’re feeling properly out at sea now. We have confidence in a world with gentries and stern-ramps and clamps for the cooking. But we also have just that beginner’s sense of the ocean being a big, wide, empty place.

Ramping up the atmosphere

Fiona’s on board a real fishing trawler which is about to be put to a nefarious purpose. A storm comes in. Fiona is still in her role as cook / cleaner / dogsbody. Here’s the feel of the trawler now:

Buys says nothing, not right away. Just pulls a bit of liver from a badly gutted skate. Throws the fish down in an ice-nestled plastic box. Stares at Pearson. Stares at me.

Then, ‘You need to check the bathroom. Wee Philly’s been redecorating.’

I do my job. Clean up in the bathroom, which is indeed disgusting. Wear my oilskins and rubber boots to do it because, as the ship is moving so violently, I can’t help but be tumbled against the walls as I work.

That done, I go up to the darkening deck. Let the rain and sea spray clean me off. Caff comes in from the bow, harness clinking at his waist. Shouts, ‘This is whit his ahll aboot, is it no? A grand peedie tirl.’

A grand peedie tirl, indeed.

There are lamps at the stern. The ROV’s yellow tanks shine luridly under their glare, but the rest is emptiness. A waste of wind-torn water, nothing else.

The nouns are still doing their bit here. (Skate liver, oilskins, harness, the yellow tanks on an ROV.) But that’s all mixed up with more general atmospherics: vomiting landlubbers, a violently moving vessel, a sailor from the Orkney Isles speaking a dialect that’s all but incomprehensible.

I’m not sure I really had to research anything much here, but I had the confidence that came with research. The combination of wind + oilskins + harnesses (to stop yourself being washed into the sea) is powerfully suggestive of extreme conditions and danger. I think it’s hard to get to that kind of detail without having read and researched enough to have those ideas lying close at hand.

Climax

My climax arrives with technical detail, yes, but also just merrily over-the-top atmospherics too. So here’s the weather conditions:

The sea is all but impossible now.

The noise is the worst thing, I think. An indescribable howling. A noise that makes you realise that, every second of every minute, the boat is being assaulted by thousands of tons of water. A furious energy hurtling against the hull. And beyond that hull, only a green-black emptiness, a chilling cold.

Death’s howling army. An underworld populated by sea-monsters.

Coxsey, briefly swapping his duties on the bridge with Caff, so he can get a hot drink and a bathroom visit, pops into the galley to give me a status report. Winds of sixty miles an hour, and gusting higher. Waves well over thirty feet. Probably nearer forty. A ‘proper storm’. Force ten, a full gale.

The ‘death’s howling army’ language is obviously not the product of research. But those details about the wave heights are precisely correct given the gale force. In fact, as the storm builds, I was careful to check on the Beaufort scale precisely what Fiona would be seeing at each new point in the storm. I think that delivers some extra authenticity to the reader. It certainly gave me the confidence to write with freedom about something I’d never experienced. So it’s not just about the nouns; it’s about hard facts as well.

And then:

I go downstairs.

The fish processing room. A big bucket of fish guts still there. Scales, fins, heads, livers, guts, eyes, anything. The last person on processing duty should have shoved the lot down the discards chute, but they didn’t. Unless it was meant to be my job, perhaps.

Anyway. I take the bucket.

Go down to the engine room.

Engine. Auxiliary engine.

Pumps. Boiler. Cooling system. Whatever.

I find the cap that lets you refill the cooling system. Wrestle it off. It’s hard to do, and I gash my left hand, but I get it done. My hand looks nasty, but it’s only a cut.

Shove the fish guts into the cooling system. Not all of them, but most of them.

Go over to the auxiliary engine.

Do the same there, using all the fish guts that remain.

Nothing happens. Nothing good, nothing bad, just the engines hammering away exactly the way they did before.

I wish I knew more about engines.

But of course: Fiona knows plenty about engines. The book opens with her getting detailed instruction in how diesel engines operate. The fish guts are enough to destroy the cooling system. The engine overheats. The ship becomes uncontrollable and the crew abandons it to the waves.

I don’t think you could have the confidence to deliver that kind of climax unless you knew enough about engines to feel the whole thing was plausible (in a good-enough way; I don’t mean you need to pass an exam).

You’ll notice the nouns still play a big part in delivering that plausibility.

Summing up?

So yes, I think what I said last week is right. You’re going to struggle to deliver a real sense of authenticity without actual research. I think nouns matter. I think facts matter. I think that before you can do your Big Atmosphere work (death’s howling army and all that) you need to persuade the reader of your right to talk about this stuff at all.

If you can do all that without researching things, then that’s fine with me. But I don’t think I could do it – and I doubt if you could either.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your research

Go on then. Show me a passage which shows off (a) what a busy bee you’ve been in terms of researching stuff and (b) what fancy nouns you’ve collected on the way.

250 words, please. Add any comments that you think would be of interest.

Got that? Rubber boots on? Oilskins? Harness? Bucket of fish innards?

Good. Then go! When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

When I’m in the car with the kids, especially if it’s with the boys, I play a game of “Which would you rather?”

The questions I ask are things like this:

• “Which would you rather be? A cowardly lion or a drunken antelope?”
• “Would you rather have the feet of a goat or the tail of a giant crow?”
• “Would you prefer to swim like a fish or fly like a bird?”
• “Would you rather speak like a croaky old man or have a nose as long as your finger?”
• “Would you like to smell like a flowerpot or feel like a turnip?”

And so on.

The kids ask questions too. Teddy – who is a wonderful child, but can be extremely boring – asks only football-related questions: would you rather score 900 goals for Banbury United (a less-than-wonderful team) or 90 goals for a Premier League side?

Tally, his twin, offers questions on whatever fantasy topic is obsessing her at the time: “would you rather be an air-element creature who’s afraid of flying or a water-element one who doesn’t like getting wet?”

Except for the whole football-related thing, journeys go quite fast and pleasantly. It’s striking how deeply engaged the kids get with even the most absurd questions. “Hmm, who’d win in a battle between a giant squirrel and a platoon of 12 miniature, but grumpy, sheep? Now, let me see …”)

It’s easy to think that this kind of nonsense is a model for writing books.

1. Come up with a wonderfully imaginative concept. (uh – a world where people walk around with daemons in the form of animals, Philip Pullman’s brilliant Northern Lights concept.)
2. Keep the strokes of imagination coming – a device for truth-telling, armoured bears, nomads who live on canals, gangs of child abductors, witches, parallel universes, a knife that can slice through those universes, soul-eating spectres, and more.
3. Write it all really well – quality of execution always vastly matters, of course.
4. Get a bestseller, a film deal, and about 200 tons of critical praise.

And yes. Kind of. But mostly no.

It’s conventional to praise the imagination of novelists – conventional for novelists to honour that aptitude, conventional for teachers to praise kids for their imaginative feats.

But imagination is easy. Our car-full of idiots spouting nonsense about goat’s feet and boozy antelopes is easy enough to create. A lot of the questions feel kind of dull, but plenty don’t. They have some bite. A proto-novelist concealed in the footwell could get enough ideas to fuel a fair few novels.

The real problem isn’t coming up with stuff; it’s disciplining it. There are at least three different disciplines which matter here.

Reality is one. I wrote a novel involving the manipulation of data in an undersea cable. That’s not an absurd idea: there are loads of cables. The war in Ukraine has exposed their vulnerability. There are plenty of companies who offer the ability to operate sub-sea robots to repair breaks and the like.

But (if you’re writing realistic, adult novels) you can’t just wave your hands at all that stuff. You need some measure of accuracy. That’s not really because your readership is going to know all about sub-sea cable repair. It’s more that your writing won’t smell authentic unless it’s deeply rooted in reality. The more you discover about the reality, the more you’ll find details which seem utterly compelling.

So that’s a constraint, a fierce one.

Next, novelty.

Your strokes of imagination are of no value if they feel jaded. Picking up Pullman’s ideas about daemons has no real use now: he’s done it. You could fool around with the exact definition of that idea (daemons take human, not animal, form; children don’t have them, adults do; only the evil or the powerful have daemons; etc), but no matter what you did, the idea would lack novelty. It would lack that sense of something fresh and compelling that readers (and agents) demand.

That’s another fiercely hard constraint to meet.

And then, coherence.

Pullman wrote two back-to-back trilogies about the same fantasy world, but (for my money) only the first of the novels really excels – that book is a true kids’ classic, one that ought to be read and honoured in 100 years’ time. The rest? Crikey, it just gets so baggy. It’s one thing after another. A cowardly lion, then a drunken antelope, then a 900-career-goals player from a north Oxfordshire town, then, what?, a boy with the feet of a goat and the odour of a flowerpot?

Having everything in your novel be new, compelling and yet also clustering round some meaningful central concern? That’s hard.

The difficult thing in writing isn’t imagination as such. It’s roping up those creatures of the imagination into an enclosure that feels realistic, new and coherent. That’s hard. That’s why we’re here, scratching away at these pages, trying to get them to feel right.

And you?

You’re doing something hard and something worth doing. And if you’re doing something hard, but worthwhile, then for the love of every goat-footed boy in Banbury, get help.

And …

Help is 30% cheaper in November

You can become a Premium Member for 30% off (our lowest price ever.) You get our library of self-paced video courses. You get our community. You get AgentMatch. You get live weekly events and workshops (including themed content such as Getting Published and Build Your Book). You get entry to all our competitions. You get query letter reviews (once a year). You get to Ask Us Anything. You get to be supported by probably the most supportive and expert writing group on the planet.

So: join us. We’d be thrilled.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Ingredients mix

What are the big imaginative strokes in your novel? Like what are the 10-15 biggest elements in your novel? If you’re writing kids’ fantasy novels, that’ll involve obviously imaginative elements like daemons and talking bears. But even if you’re writing perfectly realistic fiction, there’ll be some big elements that give flavour to the entire novel. So: list them out.

The questions I want you to think about when you review your work and give feedback to others are: does this list feel coherent and new? Does it all fit together? Does this collection of ideas feel like a novel?

Because this is a new sort of exercise, let me give you an example of what I’m after. If I were thinking about the make-up of This Thing of Darkness (my subsea cable story), I’d list the following big elements:

1. Cold cases
2. “Impossible” robberies carried out by elite climber
3. Locked room murder puzzle (Marine engineer found hanged in locked room)
4. Exam for sergeant
5. Exhibits officer
6. Ships, marine surveying, the American fiancée of dead engineer
7. Sub-sea cable and interference by hedge-fund types
8. Very good amateur climber who helps Fiona
9. Abduction of Fiona
10. Post abduction trauma and lots of dope-smoking
11. Burgling a young woman in London, smoking dope with her, losing shoes
12. Climax on a trawler in the Irish Sea. Bad guys. Guns. Fiona sinks ship. Rescue.
13. Post-rescue coverup (by Fiona). Arrest of elite climber

That all feels like a reasonable mix to me, except that the “exhibits officer” bit feels a little out of place. And honestly, reviewing the novel now, I’d consider ditching that exhibits officer strand. It added a layer of complexity and atmosphere to the novel which it barely needed. (My books don’t lack either of those things.) Otherwise, yes, that all feels like a nice package – imaginative enough, but also coherent and intriguing.

So: that’s your example. Now go and prepare your own list. Post into this forum on Townhouse. (Remember to log in first!) As ever, be generous with your reviews of others’ work.

Til soon.

Harry

I’ve been working as a freelance editor for twenty years and have run the Jericho Self-Edit Your Novel course since April 2011, together with Emma Darwin. In that time, I’ve spotted some general trends when people come to self-edit - though sometimes people don’t realise just how messy their draft is, and how much work they need to do before they have a sparkly final draft, ready to pitch to agents and publishers or to self-publish.

But listen: don’t feel bad about murdering darlings. Nothing is wasted when it comes to creative writing. But do please be open to making radical changes if it means the story will work better for readers. That might mean accepting third person works better than first, for example, or changing the tenses.

Here, I’m going to take you through the top six most common mistakes that authors need to correct when they come to self-edit.

1. Starting in the wrong place

Some people start their novels too early. They write their way into the story, which doesn’t actually get going until chapter three or four. Other authors start too late. They want their story to begin with an attention-grabbing bang, but then realise that the reader has no idea who these people are or what’s going on. That means the following chapters move into back story, and the promise made in the first chapter hasn’t been upheld.

2. Scenes lack narrative drive

Everything in your draft needs to have an identifiable function in moving the story forwards in some way. If both plot and character are in the same place at the end of a scene as they were at the beginning, that’s probably a sign that the pace has slumped. On the Self-Edit Your Novel course, we share techniques and tools for ensuring that everything in your draft earns its keep.

3. It's not clear which character (or characters) have ownership of the story

Characters are the reader’s representatives in your fictional world, but there’s a limit to the number of people they can fully identify with. There should be a minimum of one person whose journey readers follow from beginning to end, and all your charactersneed to be distinct from each other.You’d be surprised at how many manuscripts I see that have multiple characters whose names start with the same initial, for example.

Hiya pals, I won the live show for the First 500 Novel Competition last year, and in preparation for this year’s competition the lovely people at Jericho have let me come and chat to you about why entering the First 500 might be one of the best things you can do for you and your writing.

Lots of people will say nice things to you

The live show was wonderful. Not only did I get to sit and listen to all the other talented finalists read their work, but I had three separate literary agents say wonderful things about my writing. To my actual face! Which let’s be real, in an industry that is mostly rejection and criticism was a breath of fresh air!  I also had some lovely comments in the chat from the audience as they were listening to me read.

After I won the competition, loads of writers reached out to me on Instagram to offer their congratulations and I even managed to impress my Mum. No small feat!

You can win free stuff

Winning First 500 means that I now get free Premium Membership to Jericho Writers for life. I log in at least three times a week because if I have a question about drafting or editing or querying, chances are that Jericho has a masterclass on it. I’ve also been keeping up to date with Becca Day’s Diary of a Published Author series which has helped keep me on track with my own edits, and also offers a great insight into what it is like to be a working writer today.

You have an inbuilt deadline

As well as premium membership, I also won a one-to-one with a literary agent and a Manuscript Assessment with Jericho Writers, and I got a year from winning them to use them up. To take full advantage of these, I needed to keep myself on a strict schedule for drafting and completing my first round of self-edits. Having this deadline has kept me accountable, and I’ve made so much progress on my novel this year.

I had my one-to-one with a literary agent last month where I got some brilliant feedback which was great at helping me tighten up my synopsis and I’m aiming to send my manuscript away for assessment in a few weeks (if I can stop being so precious about it and finally let it go!)

You have an achievement to add to your writer bio

Whether you win First 500 or get shortlisted or longlisted you can add that achievement to your writer bio when applying for other opportunities or when you are querying agents. As a newbie writer, I felt quite intimidated about applying for writing opportunities when it seemed like every other ‘emerging’ writer had seventeen degrees and loads of prestigious writing publications under their belt. Now I have a few wins of my own to add to my writer bio to help me stand out when querying.

You’ll have a compelling opening to your novel

By nature, a competition based on the first 500 words only of your novel means that those 500 words need to be doing a lot of attention-grabbing and heavy lifting. In this attention economy when agents are sifting through hundreds of submissions a week, if you can nail your opening few pages, you’ll be doing yourself a lot of favours in the long run. There are loads of videos on the Jericho website that target how to write a good novel opening, so I would encourage you to watch them and edit your opening 500 words until they are the absolute best they can be.

I’m planning on starting my querying journey at the beginning of next year and I feel so much more confident about it knowing that my opening 500 words is working well and resonates with an audience. That is something I wouldn’t have necessarily known without entering and winning First 500.

Enter the competition

TL:DR: Enter the competition! You have nothing to lose, and if you are a Premium Member you get a free entry. Worst case scenario you don’t get longlisted, but you have a polished opening 500 words of your novel which you’re going to need anyway. Once you have those locked down, you only have to replicate that around 150ish times for your whole book. Easy right? *

*It’s absolutely not easy, I know this. I’ve personally had around 87.5 separate breakdowns about my novel this year. Shout out to my beloved writing group and their patience while I rant at them through the medium of WhatsApp voice notes.