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Let’s talk about dark stuff.

You know… secrets, trauma, murder, toxic relationships, betrayal, obsession, grief, manipulation, psychological warfare disguised as small talk over coffee.

Fun, right?

If you’re writing thrillers, crime, horror, dark romance, or anything remotely gritty, dark themes come with the territory. But writing them well? That’s a whole different skill set. Anyone can throw a dead body into chapter one. Not everyone can make readers feel something while they’re reading it.

So let’s break it down.

Dark doesn’t mean miserable

There’s a big difference between dark and depressing.

Dark themes work best when they’re balanced with moments of normalcy, humour, warmth, or hope. Think contrast. A tense interrogation scene hits harder when it follows a cozy family dinner. A shocking betrayal feels sharper if you’ve just watched the characters laugh together.

Real life isn’t wall-to-wall trauma. Neither should your novel be. Give your readers breathing room. (And give yourself some too.)

Make it emotional, not just graphic

Here’s a common mistake: equating dark with violent.

You don’t need to describe every drop of blood or every gruesome detail to make something unsettling. Often, what isn’t shown is far creepier than what is. I always like to use horror movies as an example. Now, sure, there are people who LOVE movies where every limb being chopped off is shown in graphic detail. (I’m not one of those people, but you do you.) What I find scarier is movies where the scary thing is hidden. I know it’s there. The music, the atmosphere, the lighting etc all tell me there is something bloody terrifying about to happen, but what happens in my mind is WAY scarier than anything that could be shown on screen. It’s the same with books.

If you’re purposefully writing gory fiction, fine. There’s a market for that. But if you’re leaning more into the commercial fiction side and want to appeal to as many readers as possible, instead of focusing on gore, focus on:

• How the character feels
• What they’re afraid of
• What they’re losing
• What this moment changes for them

Emotional darkness sticks longer than shock value. Psychological damage > splatter scenes. Every time.

Let your characters carry the weight

Dark themes work when they’re personal.

Readers connect to people, not concepts. So instead of “this town has a dark past,” show us how that past ruined someone’s marriage. Instead of “she survived trauma,” show us how she flinches when someone raises their voice. Let your characters embody the darkness. That’s where the power lives.

Don’t romanticize the bad stuff

If you’re writing about abuse, addiction, manipulation, or violence, be mindful of how you frame it.

You don’t need to preach. But you also don’t want to accidentally glamorize something destructive unless that’s part of the story (and even then, there should usually be consequences). Dark themes feel more real when they’re messy and complicated, not aestheticized into something shiny. Toxic is toxic, even if he’s tall and broody.

Use darkness to reveal truth

The best dark moments aren’t there just to be edgy. They reveal character. They expose secrets. They force decisions. They strip away masks.

Ask yourself:

• What does this dark moment change?
• What does it reveal?
• Who becomes someone new because of it?

If the answer is “nothing,” the scene probably doesn’t need to exist.

Protect your own mental health (seriously)

My darkest novel is The Woman In The Cabin. It’s also my bestselling novel (just goes to show, readers love darkness!). But I didn’t write that book in a healthy way. I spent way too much time with the darkness inside those pages. It became all consuming. By the time I finished writing it, I was exhausted, miserable, and found myself all-consumed by the bad in the world. It’s no coincidence that my next book was called a ‘popcorn thriller’ and reviews said it was ‘not as dark as The Woman In The Cabin’. I literally wasn’t capable of doing it again!

Writing dark material can mess with your head. You’re spending hours inside imaginary trauma, after all.

So:

• Take breaks
• Watch something light after heavy writing sessions
• Move your body
• Talk to real humans
• Don’t binge-write murder scenes at midnight for three days straight (Ask me how I know.)

You’re allowed to care for yourself while creating heavy stories.

Remember: Readers love the dark… when it’s done well

People don’t pick up dark novels because they want to feel awful. They pick them up because they want to feel something. They want intensity. Catharsis. Suspense. Emotional payoff. They want to explore scary or painful ideas safely through fiction.

Your job isn’t to traumatize your reader. It’s to take them on a journey they won’t forget.

Now go ruin someone’s fictional life.

Our expert tutors are here to guide you, whether it’s building heart-stopping suspense, crafting complex characters, or mastering the art of the twist. Take your crime and thriller writing to the next level with our expert tutors. Work one-to-one with thriller author Megan Collins on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, or join crime author Graham on our six-week Crime & Thriller course to master suspense, plot twists, and red herrings.

Today and for the next few weeks, we’re all about openings.

That’s in honour of our new self-paced video course – free to Premium Members – called The Ultimate Start. The course aims to get your novel off to a bang … and to introduce you to our ever-fabulous Ultimate Novel Writing Programme tutors. Each module of the course is presented by a different Ultimate Novel Writing Programme tutor. If you’re even half-curious about the course, you should definitely take a look. Lesson one is now live with new lessons dropping on Mondays. 

This is also a good moment to mention my webinar next week (29 Jan) on Elevator Pitches, which is free and open for all to attend. (Info here.) Most people think about pitches as something you consider long after the text is complete – a marketing sticker you glue onto an already-finished product.

I don’t think that’s especially helpful, however, because really the marketing concept needs to be baked into the book from the very start. You need to think of the pitch less as a marketing slogan, and more like the condensed essence of the book – a blueprint. And if you get that right, then everything else flows – from text to marketing slogans, and from cover design to query letters.

Those two themes – opening pages and novel blueprints – combine very sweetly in this insight:

Your opening pages need to offer a glimpse of the heart-of-the-heart and the soul-of-the-soul of the book.

It’s OK (actually, it’s good) if the glimpse is oblique or cryptic. You can trust that readers will smell it anyway, like a truffle buried at the root of a tree. And if you have a perfectly designed blueprint / pitch with everything neatly lined up behind it, then that opening page will also cohere with your title and your book cover and the blurb on the back … and so the scent of that opening page will be reinforced before you start.

Now all this sounds a bit woo-woo, I know. (It’ll be a lot less woo-woo if you come to my elevator pitch workshop.) But here are some examples:

Fiona Griffiths, Book #1, Talking to the Dead

The pitch: “Murder story, involving a detective who used to think she was dead.”

Excerpts from Chapter 1

“Beyond the window, I can see three kites hanging in the air over Bute Park. One blue, one yellow, one pink. Their shapes are precise, as though stencilled. From this distance, I can’t see the lines that tether them, so when the kites move, it’s as though they’re doing so of their own accord. An all-encompassing sunlight has swallowed depth and shadow”

…

“I’m going to be a policewoman. And just five years ago, I was dead.”

The last bit there is a direct invocation of pitch: Here’s someone who is clearly alive, but she used to be dead. That, very succinctly, is the paradox at the heart of Fiona’s  existence.

But the opening paragraph does something similar. The kites move (so they’re ‘alive’), but there are no lines tethering them and all depth and shadow has vanished, so it’s as though the kites have become stencils – mere copies of kites, not real ones. Are these kites real or just painted copies? It’s not clear. That’s the same basic paradox, but in oblique form.

Fiona Griffiths, Book #2, Love Story, with Murders

The pitch (series): “Detective who used to think she was dead” – as above

The pitch (book): “Love story – with murders (!)”

Excerpt from Chapter 1

“Penry opens his hands in what’s meant to be a spreading gesture, only they never get more than about eight inches apart. It’s as though the ghosts of his handcuffs are still there.”

The “alive or dead?” theme is instantly mirrored in the “captive or not captive?” image here.

The love story with murders bit is perhaps a bit less well captured (my bad), except that this opening scene has two proper friends (=love) discussing a recent prison suicide (=murder), so both things are entangled right there on page 1.

Fiona Griffiths, Book #3, Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

The pitch (series): “Detective who used to think she was dead” – as above

The pitch (book): “Detective (with pre-existing identity confusion) goes undercover.”

Excerpt from Chapter 1

“I bite down onto my thumb, hard enough to give myself a little blue ledge of pain. I let my mind rest on that ledge, while the scenario in front of me plays itself out.

‘And these are all employees? Contracts in place? Bank accounts in order? ...’

‘Yes. They are all contracted employees. We have their contracts. Their bank details. Everything. But two of the people – these two,’ he says, circling two names on the spreadsheet, ‘these two don’t actually exist.’”

Again, you have the ‘Does it exist or doesn’t it?” question popping right up in the first chapter. And the thing about biting down onto the thumb is speaking directly about a kind of mental ill-health – not in a loud, shouty way, but still: an unmissable indicator.

Now, if I’m honest, I think that the second and third examples here are missing some central image that tells us what the book is going to be about (as opposed to the series.)

In Book #6 of the series (where the theme was theft and fakery in the world of Dark Age antiquities), I had one of Fiona’s colleagues build a dinosaur out of office stationery, which she then exploded with a crossbow, also made from office stationery. She then says:

“And that’s how we are ‒ me, Jon, the bones of the fallen ‒ when Dennis Jackson [Fiona’s boss] comes in.”

And that’s a perfect image: the fakery, the death, the long-ago past – the perfect way to tease the reader with what is to follow.

And it’s not just a tease: it’s a promise. You’re effectively saying: “You smelled something in the furniture of this book – the cover, the title, the blurb, the slogans – that hint at a blueprint you simply can’t resist. This first page / first chapter promises you that I, the author, understand that blueprint and will deliver it … and it’ll be every bit as enticing as you expect.”

How could any reader not respond?

In short:

1. Know your blueprint – understand in absolute clarity the purpose of your book. Why are you writing it? What makes it special? What is the heart-of-the-heart of your book’s appeal to the reader?
2. Make sure that those themes glitter beneath the surface of those opening pages. Make sure that you wink at the reader and reiterate that opening promise.

Yes, you have to do other things too (settings, character, a hint of story), but hinting at your themes early on is a key piece of delivering a totally coherent and utterly irresistible package for the reader. Do jump into that course on opening pages – especially, if you want a little taster of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme experience. And do come to my workshop.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / opening pages

No normal Feedback Friday this week. Instead, I want you to do Megan Collins’s homework from The Ultimate Start course. That homework is this:

Look at your opening 500 words and post in the forum here. Ask if your peers can guess your genre from this opening. Post to the forum, then read and comment on the thoughts of at least two of your fellow writers. Can you learn anything from their observations?

Ask any cop what the go-to insult of those hilarious people on a night out is and I’ll bet you they reply with, ‘Oink oink. Can anyone smell pork?’ As you can imagine that splits their sides. So much so that they often ask the comedian to come and spend the night in their free bed and breakfast facility to reward their wit.

As writers, we are always being told to ‘show’ through the senses. How do things sound, smell, feel, look, taste? The good news is that police stations and crime scenes are replete with stimulants to excite each sense, except maybe taste.

Immersing the reader

So, unless you’ve been in the police or had the misfortune to grace the inside of a cell block, been victim or witness to a violent crime or worked in a mortuary, you might only be able to imagine the unique, gut wrenching smells that such workplaces emanate.

Take a cell block – or custody suite as they are sometimes pompously called. Who’s resident behind the three inch green (or blue) steel doors? Well, you have drunks, vagrants, prisoners entering their third shower-less day, the incontinent (often deliberately so), the dirty protestors and just your average Joe whose fetid footwear stands sentry outside their cell. Add to that the whiff of cleaning fluid and the cremation of microwave ready-meals and you start to get an idea of just how violently the olfactory glands are assaulted.

What about the sounds? It might come as a surprise that many prisoners don’t just settle down quietly with a book and wait for their turn to be interviewed. Some like to remind the custody officers they are still there, sometimes in quite colourful terms. A few tenacious souls believe that if they punch, or headbutt, the metal door often enough they will break through to freedom. Unsurprisingly, their neighbours have a view about this constant racket and offer to rearrange the culprit’s body parts the moment they meet. On a serious note, there are far too many people with mental health problems in police cells and the sounds of their distress can be heartbreaking.

As well as the din created by the prisoners, custody staff often find it difficult to gently close the cell doors when a hefty slam seems far more satisfying. Their key-chains jangle at every move and police officers’ radios squawk and bleat pretty much constantly.

It’s no less distinctive out at crime scenes. I remember, as a tender eighteen-year-old recruit arriving to the report of a man being beaten half to death behind some shops in Bognor Regis. As we stepped out of the car, I asked my tutor what that smell was. ‘Get used to it son, it’s the cocktail of death.’ Luckily this chap did not die but the aroma still lingered. The blend of blood and alcohol produces a sickly sweet, yet ferrous, smell. It’s quite distinctive but strangely not that unpleasant. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t buy it as a fragrance but it’s not as revolting as the cell block or, worse still, the lung-lingering stench of a decomposing body or the odours a body wafts during a post mortem.

Applying this to characters

If your protagonist is a police officer then never forget they are human beings. Both of my non-fiction books deliberately depict what it feels like to police certain incidents. Cops experience fear, dread, pain and PTSD the same as everyone else. They also have to show gargantuan restraint (imagine interviewing a child rapist and keeping your anger in check), stem the giggles and turn to gallows humour to get through the day. You will want your readers to really care about your characters so showing these states, maybe through ‘close point of view’, is essential. Don’t be afraid for them to cry, get angry or make mistakes as, after all, aren’t these the symptoms of stress and isn’t that great to put your characters through? I’m often accused of subjecting my fictional protagonist Chief Superintendent Jo Howe to the most dreadful jeopardy, but that’s the point!

If you'd like more invaluable insights from Graham you can join him on the next intake for Writing Crime and Thriller Novels. Fancy meeting him before you commit to taking the course? You can book a 20-minute Meet Your Tutor session for just £20, which is fully refundable against the cost of the course if you go on to study with us.

One of the most famous haikus in the Japanese canon is this:

An old pond.

A frog jumping into

The sound of water.

That’s a literal translation, but (if I understand this right) the ambiguity of what the frog is jumping into (the water or the sound?) is there in the seventeenth century original.

The poem is partly famous because it epitomises the art-form’s focus on the single moment. It’s as though the poem is trying to give you everything you really need to know about one particular moment, without trying to draw out any lessons from it.

Just – there was a pond. A frog jumped in. Plop – the sound of water. No need for further discussion. That’s just how that particular moment was. A single significant moment captured with extreme brevity.

But …

Human minds don’t work quite like that and human language is the same. So, yes, a frog jumping into water is just something that frogs do, a perfectly normal observation. But a frog jumping into the sound of water – well, I guess frogs do that too, but it’s a very different type of thought. The frog becomes suddenly a thing of energy and movement and magic, not a small, cold wet thing you could hold in the palm of your hand.

And then again: we start with an old pond. I’m guessing we see something with mature weeds, an unruffled surface, a lack of movement. But then: a dart of movement and a very temporary sound. So something old still flickers with something evanescent and alive. Our sense of the pond at the end is changed from what we imagined at the start.

Now – haiku and novels: not natural bedfellows. Given that I tend to write long – my first novel was 180,000+ words – haiku are a very, very long way from my place of happiness.

But – it struck me that our books often contain secret little haikus of their own. Here are some examples of what I mean:

1. Handmade kitchen furniture in ivory. A range cooker in Wedgwood blue. More flowers. Venetian blinds, sofas and sunlight.
   
   
2. Behind us, a row of Edwardian houses. In front, a strip of grass. Then the river. The grass has been recently mown and the air smells of cut grass and river mud.
   
   
3. Summer-evening normality. A few lawnmowers still buzzing. Kids being ordered off their bikes into dinner. A couple of fat blokes with white legs and unflattering shorts talking rubbish over a garden fence.
   
   
4. Warm air and quiet streets. Daylight, or the memory of it, still alive in the sky. I’m feeling spacey.
   
   
5. Not mountainous exactly, but high moorland. No dead miners here, just sheep looming white in the tussocky grass. No cars. No buildings. No people.

• The grass around the car park is shorn so close that it’s burned and brown. Car windscreens catch the sun and throw it at me over the tarmac. Over the other side of the road is a field, spiny with marsh grasses and a board offering land for sale.

• Six days slide by almost unnoticed. Dark fish in an urban canal. Sleep and I aren’t best of friends.

• I see Brydon at table. White parasol flapping in the sea breeze. Shadows jumping to avoid the sunshine.

• Sea breeze. Gorse and broom blazing yellow in the hedges. Then a field of sheep and my first view of the lighthouse.

I hope you feel some haiku-ishness here. What I mean is fragments of text that

1. collect together a small handful of ordinary observations
2. Don’t especially try to connect those observations
3. Don’t especially try to comment on those observations.
4. Don’t feel like a sudden random jump into a completely different way of speaking or writing.

At the same time, you just can’t put things like this down on the page without the reader creating some kinds of connection for themselves.

So take the snippet about that suburban evening – lawnmowers and kids on bikes and men with white legs. Those are, in a way, just three truthful but disconnected observations about a sunny evening in outer Cardiff. But – they all have the smell of family and order and social connection. Fiona has none of that, or not in an ordinary way. So by presenting those images, Fiona is also offering us a little haiku that says something like:

Summer evening:

The sound of lawnmowers and children.

I don’t fit.

Or take the first example – a description of a rich woman’s kitchen. Partly that is just a straightforward way to describe a room (units = ivory; cooker = posh version of blue.)

But it ends with a tiny little haiku that seems to insert sunlight as part of the actual furnishing of the room. Something like this, in effect:

Venetian blinds

Sofas and slatted shadows

Sunlight.

Just as Basho’s frog was jumping into water and into sound, here the room is furnished with physical things (sofas, cookers, flowers) and also light, that’s been given a kind of order by the blinds. The purely physical melts a bit into something wider.

And sometimes the haikus just sneak their way into the text without needing much modification at all. Like this, for example:

Six days slide by

Dark fish in an urban canal

No sleep for me.

Now, I definitely, definitely don’t advise stopping your prose and just dropping chunks of (slightly weird) poetry into the gaps.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about finding ways to drop together a small collection of observations that make perfect sense in a purely literal way … but that offer something extra as well. Basho’s frog. A suburban world that excludes its observer. A kitchen that seems furnished in sunlight.

In one way, this is easy writing: you’re just making plain statements without any kind of rhetorical complexity. But it’s also subtle writing: you’re arranging things so that those plain statements amount to something more than the sum of their parts.

I’ve never really stopped to notice this before: it was a Christmas gift of a book of haikus that alerted me to it. But – it’s an easy technique, and it’s a powerful one. And fun.

New Year snows.

Pine needles on the floor.

The empty page.

Give it a go yourself – or, just as good, look back at your text and see if you do this already. And if you’re a Feedback-Friday-er, then give this week’s task a go.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / haiku

So: haiku

Find two or three short snippets from your book that feel a bit haiku-y, then actually rewrite them as haiku. So first give us the text as it is in your book, then the same thing in haiku form. (Or roughly haiku form: I don’t care about exact syllable counts.) When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

I’m really excited to see what you come back with. Good luck!

Til soon.

Harry

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

Month Nine is all about learning to edit our own writing. When I first started taking my dream of being a published novelist seriously, the editing phase felt like going to the dentist: necessary, but uncomfortable. I didn’t know where to start, what decisions to make, or how to break the task into chunks my writer’s brain could handle. Every change felt like vandalising something fragile — taking a knife to a newborn. 

Now? The editing phase is the part I look forward to most. It’s when I feel at my most creative and most deeply engaged with the art form. 

Drafting, for me, is like pulling together a big lump of clay and roughly squishing it into the shape I’m after. I’m sketching characters broadly and trying ideas I don’t yet fully understand. I feel self-conscious around them — they don’t know me, and I don’t know them — but I follow the impulses that arrive. By the end of the first draft, that clay is at least “head-shaped.” 

Then editing begins. Sharpening, distilling, refining. This is the stage where the novel’s face starts to emerge. Suddenly I discover the real reason for a character’s behaviour. I feel a spark of satisfaction when a plot beat clicks neatly into place and reveals what I meant all along. The book’s heartbeat grows stronger. Editing becomes creative play rather than the punishment I once feared. It feels like discovery, not destruction. I’ve learned that editing isn’t a penance — it’s the gateway to mastery. 

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t frightening. This is the phase when the “real world” draws closer. My once-private, infant novel is getting ready to be read — and that’s when doubt creeps in. What if the entire story is wrong? What if everyone laughs? What if readers miss everything I hoped they’d see? Decision fatigue sets in. I hear phantom footsteps as the draft edges toward daylight. 

That’s why I’ve worked so hard on my own self-editing skills: because they are essential for surviving feedback. Every writer who wants to be read will face multiple layers of it — agents, editors, beta readers, early reviewers. As the line from the film, The Wife goes: “A writer has to be read, honey.” Readers complete our art in their minds, and they bring their own interpretations — sometimes beautifully, sometimes bafflingly. The feedback can be well-meaning yet difficult to absorb, and the emotional whiplash can be painful. The market phase isn’t cruel, but it is real. 

For me, editing is where I reconnect with my North Star. I remind myself why this story mattered to me in the first place. I return to its emotional and thematic core. I protect my voice — because if I am not being fully myself in my own work, then whose story am I telling? I also get clear on my boundaries: the non-negotiables, the lines I will not cross. In this process, I try to behave like a tree — roots deep, branches flexible. Standing firm in my creative convictions, yet able to bend toward insight. External critique can deepen the roots, if I let it. 

This is why I don’t self-edit alone. I need trusted critique partners. I need people who can teach me craft techniques. I need professional eyes to remind me of the commercial realities of the book world. I need a toolkit of approaches that help me see my own pages afresh. Good self-editing is equal parts internal skill and external support. 

Editing isn’t the end of writing; it’s where the writing becomes itself. Over the years, I’ve gathered tools, gathered my people, and learned how to refine with increasing confidence. And I expect to spend the rest of my writing life doing exactly this. 

A big part of that growth has come from investing in tutored courses — including programmes like the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. If you want guidance, structure, accountability, and a community of thoughtful advisors, you would be hard pushed to find a better foundation for your own creative development. 

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.

So… perhaps you are thinking about enrolling on a Jericho Writers course - the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, for example. You’re considering how the logistics would work, realising you can make it all happen and starting to get excited.

But then something disconcerting happens: you hear a whisper that won’t disappear. You may have met it before - in writing or in your life more broadly.

Who am I to do this?
What if everyone else is more talented, more educated, more real than me?
What if they find out I don’t belong here at all?

That voice is familiar to every writer I’ve ever taught or mentored, and it is one that I hear too. It’s part of what we term impostor syndrome. It’s the fog that rolls in precisely when you dare to make something new. And often, that voice doesn’t even belong to you. It comes in borrowed tones: an unsupportive friend, a disbelieving parent, a teacher who once said you’d 'never make it.' Perhaps it’s the lingering weight of class and education — the sense that stories are for other people, those who went to different schools, read the right books, had the right accent. We cannot deny that structural inequality is a thing, and deeply impactful.

The first lesson you must learn is this: those voices may live in your head, but they were put there by someone else. You can thank them for their contribution, and then quietly show them the door. Here are some suggestions for how you might go about it, drawn from my first teaching book, The Alchemy…

Name the impostor (and its chorus)

When you hear, You’re not really a writer, address the source of that claim.

Ah, impostor. There you are. It loses power when you shine a light on it. Then listen closely — whose tone is that? Your old boss? A teacher’s clipped remark? An entire cultural system that teaches some people art is a luxury rather than a right?

PAH!

Once you know the owner of the voice, you can answer it. Because imposter syndrome is rarely born of arrogance or delusion; it’s often the bruised echo of exclusion. Naming the chorus that sings inside your head is the first step toward writing in your own voice.

The function of self-doubt

I am wary of anyone who claims never to feel self-doubt. Doubt, after all, is not proof of weakness; it’s a sign of thinking. It’s what intelligent, creative people do when they look at the vastness of what they don’t yet know. It’s the mind taking stock, the imagination testing its own boundaries.

Self-doubt, in moderation, is a function of intellect and creativity. It keeps you curious. It stops you from becoming complacent. But — here’s the danger — it can turn carnivorous if you feed it too much. Don’t let it eat you up. Doubt should prod you into refinement, not paralysis. It’s the small flame that sharpens your awareness, not the wildfire that consumes the whole forest.

So when you feel uncertain, don’t panic. It may mean you’re growing. Just don’t let that alertness harden into self-hatred. You can hold the doubt lightly, examine it, even write it into your work, but you needn’t obey it.

While I am on this point, whatever happens in your writing and publishing life, guard against bitterness; the bitterness that can come from disappointment. Bitterness is entirely corrosive: of relationships, creativity and joy.

Progress over perfection

The impostor’s favourite weapon is perfectionism. It tells you, If it’s not brilliant, it’s worthless. But that’s an impossible standard, and it kills creativity. In The Alchemy, I talk about gentle productivity: measuring progress by compassion, not punishment.

Ask yourself each day: What can I do gently today? Maybe it’s fifty words. Maybe it’s rereading a paragraph. Maybe it’s rest. Small acts accumulate. Writing a novel is an endurance event made of many tiny mercies. You don’t need to be magnificent; you need to persist. (Although do try to be magnificent!)

Educational ghosts

Many of us carry the ghosts of our schooling. The red-pen humiliation. The essay returned with 'You don’t understand' scrawled across it. (I always mark in green, by the way!) The implication that writing belongs to cleverer, posher, more literary people. If your education was patchy, or practical, or stopped too soon, you might still feel that someone else has the key to a room you’re locked out of.

But you’re not outside the room — you’re building your own. I might argue that the books which changed literature were written by people who didn’t fit the mould. The rough edges of your experience will become the texture of your prose. You don’t need to write like the canon; you need to write like yourself.

When those ghosts start muttering 'Not for the likes of you', remember: they are history. You are the living, present tense. Do also remember that, even if you are lucky enough to have a loving family about you, if this is something you are becoming, and if you have done something visibly clever, it’s possible that your family, friends and acquaintances will still think you’re a bit of a twit. Often, we get swatted back to our earliest pathology and to the role that, often unwittingly, groups of people have assigned to us.

It’s a bit like Christmas with your family, I always say. Nod politely. WE know the truth, right?

The evidence file

Keep an evidence file. Each time you show up to write, note it down. Each time you finish a scene, ask a good question in a workshop, or receive a kind word from a reader, write that down too.

When the impostor chorus gets loud, open the file. Look at what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy or partial. The point is to prove to yourself that you are here, doing the work. Facts are stronger than feelings, and seeing your own persistence in black and white can be the best antidote to doubt.

Comparison: the false arithmetic

On a course, it’s easy to look sideways. Someone’s writing glows; someone’s structure looks tidy; someone already has an agent. The impostor feeds on this. But comparison is a false arithmetic. You are not on the same timetable as anyone else. Some of you are writing in stolen moments before dawn; others after the kids are in bed. Some have studied literature; others have lived it. All of it is valid.

Your only reliable measure is this: Did I attend to my own work today? That’s the only question that matters.

Community

Talk about it. Say, 'I feel like a fraud.' Watch the nods around you. Everyone does, even those who seem most secure. The silence around impostor syndrome is what gives it teeth. When you share your doubt, you build community — and community softens the fear.

I tell my students: the most important conversations aren’t always about technique. They’re about resilience, about how to keep faith with the work when your head fills with noise. Every time you speak honestly about that noise, you make the space safer for someone else. It’s like passing on the baton and why I have been very open about my difficult background and, as far as I can, the complexity and challenges of my roles now, which include complex needs in my immediate family and coping with chronic illness (which is not to say that everyone must do this; some people do not feel safe so doing and that is fine).

Also, it’s important to distinguish publishing from writing. You can attend to your writing but, although it can be different if you are self-publishing and good at the business side, there is little of the publication side of things which you can control. If you can strengthen self-regard and nurse the sense that you have done a bold thing and the best work you can do, the situation will be easier for you to manage.

The alchemy of belonging

Gentle productivity says this: you don’t have to earn your belonging. You already belong, because you are here, doing the work. Self-doubt, impostor feelings, the internalised voices of class or family or fear — these are part of the creative landscape, not proof of your fraudulence.

You may never silence them completely. Few of us do. But you can learn to write alongside them. You can make a kind of peace. You can even turn them into fuel — the friction that sparks empathy, complexity, tenderness in your prose. It took me some time to grasp this, but now it underpins everything.

That’s the alchemy: transforming doubt into story, anxiety into attention, fear into the persistence that finishes a book. So when you sit down tomorrow and that old chorus begins — your teacher, your parents, the inner critic, your dodgy ex-husband, that friend who’s been a bit snarky — take a breath, smile, and start anyway.

You belong here, writer. You always have. The trick is simply to keep writing until you believe it. We are all here to support you.

Anna

If you'd like more encouragement from Anna, you can join her on this spring's Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. Fancy meeting her before you commit to taking the course? You can book a 20-minute Meet Your Tutor session for just £20, which is fully refundable against the cost of the Programme if you go on to study with us.

In my closing email of 2025, I talked about cliff jumping – growing your wings on the descent – accepting that you have to embark on your novel-writing project knowing that, right now, you don’t have the tools to deliver it.

In this, the first email of 2026, I want to pick up that theme of taking flight, but in a different context.

Novels cover a lot of space. They have big jobs to do. You have to herd your characters from here to there, reveal information, generate and delineate conflicts, mention settings and all that. Most of the time, your prose just needs to pull its boots on and get those jobs ticked off your immense and ever-growing list.

But for what? Why?

Yes: because a well-constructed, well-told story generates emotional power all of its own. That’s a win. But your prose doesn’t always have to wear boots. Everyone now and then it can do a hop, skip and a jump. A little leap into something higher, lighter and wider.

Here’s what I mean. Here’s a passage from one of the Fiona books (this one concerned with the archaeology of Dark Age Britain) as I could have written it:

At one point, I have to go back to Cardiff to receive my Formal Written Warning from Bleddyn Jones and some pretty blonde bob in Human Resources. And when that happy ritual is complete, I head home for some fresh clothes and find, waiting on my doormat, some padded envelopes with my eBay treasure.

My Roman glass. A silver bell. Some beads of Whitby jet.

When Katie tells me that she’s arranged for the dig at Dinas Powys to be re-opened, just for a week or two, just so the initial exploratory project can be completed as planned, I give her six of my Whitby beads. She will scatter them into the trench and cover them over with soil. When they are ‘found’, they will be logged, analysed and uploaded to the project website.

Eighteen beads left.

That passage does literally everything that’s plot relevant: Fiona secures some ancient jet beads and inserts them into a dig-site, for reasons that only become clear later in the book.

So far as Prose-Wearing-Boots is concerned, this passage is a perfect tick. No words wasted. Job done. Move on.

But?

Every now and then – and certainly not too often – we want something higher, lighter and wider, no? Something like this (with additions underlined.)

At one point, I have to go back to Cardiff to receive my Formal Written Warning from Bleddyn Jones and some pretty blonde bob in Human Resources. And when that happy ritual is complete, I head home for some fresh clothes and find, waiting on my doormat, some padded envelopes with my eBay treasure.

My Roman glass. A silver bell. Some beads of Whitby jet.

When I go back to Oxford, to interview more academics or sit across a table as Oakeshott’s grieving students explain to me how utterly surprising and mysterious and inexplicable his death was, I keep one hand in my pocket, where I keep my two dozen beads of Romano‒Celtic jet.

Roll those beads round and round, little emissaries from a distant age, and I remember that nothing is for ever.

King Arthur was not for ever.

His defeat of the Saxons was not for ever.

Inspector Jones of the Irritating Beard: he too is not for ever.

When Katie tells me that she’s arranged for the dig at Dinas Powys to be re-opened, just for a week or two, just so the initial exploratory project can be completed as planned, I give her six of my Whitby beads. She will scatter them into the trench and cover them over with soil. When they are ‘found’, they will be logged, analysed and uploaded to the project website.

Eighteen beads left.

And nothing is for ever.

That’s 100 additional words, but those words give us a vastly expanded view of the moment. All of a sudden, Fiona has reduced the present moment to a tiny dot on a vast historical timeline. First Arthur and the defeat of the Saxons – then Inspector Jones – then who knows what? Nothing is for ever.

That’s a bland truism of course – we all know that nothing is forever. The sun will explode, the turtles holding up the world will get tired, or whatever else. But because Fiona calls our attention to this truth, stretching history out for us to see, we also come to feel how small our place in it is. That sudden change of perspective lifts the whole passage.

And one more thing. Fiona has been investigating a death – Oakeshott’s. His former students and colleagues find that death surprising and mysterious, and so it is. But it also a tiny dot on a vast timeline. Fiona considers his death and her Romano-Celtic beads in the same moment.

We feel something different about this death, about Fiona and ourselves because – just for a moment – Mr Prose-In-Boots gave way to Ms Prose-with-Wings.

You don’t have to do it.

You can’t do it much or often without seeming dull and self-important. But? It’s fun to do sometimes – and it can be the handful of herbs that scents the whole pot.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Nothing is for ever

So: wings.

Give me any passage where Ms Prose-with-Wings takes over (however briefly) from Mr Prose-In-Boots. Sometimes, that might just be a phrase or sentence. Sometimes, it could be a chunk of 100 words or more.

But dig it out and let’s admire. When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Spread joy. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

A new year always brings a fresh page. For writers, it’s a chance to pause, reflect on what worked (and what didn’t), and think about how we want to show up for our writing in the months ahead.

At Jericho Writers, we’re writers and word-lovers at every stage. Some are published, some are drafting, and some don’t write at all, but we all love reading and keeping creative routines.

So, for 2026, we asked some of the team to share their insights, approaches, and lessons. From small daily habits to protecting mental space, from letting go of comparison to finding joy in the process again, here’s how the Jericho Writers team plans to keep moving their words forward this year and maybe inspire you to do the same.

Finding joy and avoiding pressure

Hear from some of the Marketing & Membership team on how they’re rediscovering the fun in writing.

"My next book releases in March and is totally done - I've finished my proofread and it's now off with the publisher to work their magic. For reasons that I'll go into in my next Diary of a Published Author episode, I've decided to hold off on signing a new contract, which means for the first time since I got my book deal in 2021 I am not writing to deadline. Let me tell you - it has been SO refreshing. After going through a phase of feeling like I'm on a literary conveyer belt, I'm actually enjoying writing again. So if I had one tip to offer up the people reading this who are still hoping and praying for that full request or offer, it would be to enjoy writing to your own schedule while you still can. Once you get published, your writing becomes a business, and it is very easy to lose the joy, so make the most of this time you've got where you can just write because you LOVE it." — Becca Day

"I'm contracted to write another book in 2026, and will also be working on editing the novel that's due out in July. My creative focus for next year is going to be on refining but embracing my own process, as well as remembering that comparison is the thief of joy. As anyone who's met me on Townhouse, at Festival or on events may know, it takes me aaaaaaaaaaages to get 'inside' a book idea - but once I do, I tend to work quickly and intensively. This year, I've let myself panic about this way too much, and I've compared myself to far more organised (less chaotic!) writers. 

In 2026, I intend to stress less and be kinder to myself. I want to remember that no two authors work in the same way and that it's OK for the start of my projects to be slower and less apparently 'productive' than might be the norm for others. I hope that accepting this will mean I'm less frustrated in the early months with my next manuscript and therefore feel happier to keep showing up, even when the words aren't flowing easily." 

— Laura Starkey

"Alongside my work at Jericho Writers, I’m a yoga teacher and I notice a lot of overlap with writing. Progress doesn’t come from pushing harder or doing more. It comes from showing up, working with what you’ve got, and paying attention to what actually feels like can be done.

Some days I do a full hour’s yoga practice, other days I just roll out the mat and breathe. Both count. Fitting writing into my day isn’t about adding more, it’s about seeing what I can take away to make space for it.

I’ve found routines work best when they follow your energy rather than fight it. Writing, like movement, is a long game. The goal isn’t punishment or perfection. It’s staying well enough to keep going."— Tanya Lewis

Consistency and daily habits

Tips from both the Writer Support team and Marketing team on building routines that actually stick.

"It's easy to set yourself a goal for the New Year. You start off enthusiastically and then a week, a month or two months later you start to feel as if you've failed because you haven't stuck to that original goal and beat yourself up. Which leads to giving up on your goal altogether.

It's much easier and realistic to start small and build on it.

Start with half an hour per day, writing, research, anything at all to do with your writing but dedicate that half an hour solidly to your project.

It's not really the motivation that gets you to the end goal, it's discipline.

When that becomes part of your schedule (they say it takes on average 72 days to form a new habit) and if feels more natural then forced, you'll find that you naturally drift over the half an hour towards an hour. There'll be times that you can't fit it in, that's fine, give yourself the space and grace to fall and get straight back on. Let your writing become a new part of your life.

And don't forget to celebrate the small wins." — Cleo Slevin

"My writing goals this year are to finish the second rewrite of my current manuscript and to keep querying the previous one (I'm setting myself a goal of at least 80 rejections). Every "no" still means the work is moving forward!

One mindset I really believe in is frequent and regular turning up to one's writing. It is a fundamental foundation that's easy to overlook because it's not flashy or a quick-fix! And on the days when you really, really don't want to or think you can't, simply aim for 5 sentences or write for just 10 minutes. — Rachel Davidson

"2026 is the year of getting more words on the page. It’s time to ignore the inner voice that screams, “The character arc isn’t there yet,” “I need to do more research,” or “Why not try outlining again?” These are all things that can be fixed in the edits. For now, it’s the first draft that matters most." —Jonny Milne

"For 2026, I'm aiming to introduce more structure into my week and organise my time more clearly. I am an avid note-taker but can find it difficult to carve out time to sit and write for a project I do alongside Jericho Writers, often preferring to strike while the words are flowing. For the New Year, I want to carve out more time regularly to sit and dedicate to writing, mimicking the inspiration I find in our Writing Rooms and particularly the members who consistently showed up in the Writing Retreat. By committing to my writing, it helps me get in the right headspace and even have further ideas for content that I can then pitch. With all of this I also want to be kind to myself and recognise more when I am not in the right headspace at that moment. For those moments, I can go back to my other creative outlets and hobbies, which often help kickstart that motivational path anyway. So in 2026, I'll build more of a schedule but also remember to stop and take a break when needed too. Take time to enjoy reading, being out in nature or just having a small sweet treat!" — Emily Mitchell

Taking breaks and self-care

Advice from our Courses team and People & Services team on stepping back and looking after yourself while writing.

"I am not a writer, but for what it's worth, I think my advice to anyone is to accept that sometimes you need to take a step away and give yourself permission not to write/work on your to-do list etc. Working to your targets and holding yourself accountable is obviously great, but sometimes we also need to remember that we're human (and life gets in the way!) and we also need to take time out to decompress and get perspective too." — Rachael Cooper

"Remember that writing a novel isn’t a race. If the words stop flowing and you find yourself stepping into 2026 without touching your manuscript, give yourself permission. Breaks aren’t a loss of momentum; they’re a clever way of tricking your brain into having ideas again. Sometimes the clearest ideas arrive only after you’ve closed the notebook or laptop, and taken some time in the world outside your novel." — Verity Hicks

"My advice for setting good habits for the new year is a simple one: read! We sometimes hear from writers who feel they only have time for writing rather than reading, but whether you're able to read five or 50 books in a year, it will still make a difference to the strength of your writing. Others can worry about accidentally absorbing another author's voice, but this (very small) risk is vastly outweighed by the skills you'll learn from reading the best novels and non-fiction. Whether it's keeping up-to-date with the latest titles in your genre, setting a New Year's resolution to tackle some of the unread paperbacks on your shelves, or reading short stories in pockets of time, reading more will develop your storytelling skills and creative mindset." — Imogen Love

As we step into 2026, one thing’s clear: there’s no single “right” way to write. Whether you’re sneaking in ten minutes before your 9-5 job, enjoying long stretches of uninterrupted flow on a Sunday, or just showing up day after day, the trick is to keep moving forward. And taking breaks count!

From all of us at Jericho Writers, here’s to a year full of curiosity and creativity to keep things interesting. Whatever shape your writing takes, may it surprise you and keep you coming back for more. Happy New Year and happy writing!