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Here’s a thought.

I’ve always said that every chapter needs to destabilise the situation that prevailed at the end of the previous chapter.

And that’s true.

The simplest way of thinking about this is:

• What was my character’s relationship to his or her goal at the end of the last chapter?
• Has that relationship been destabilised (even ever so slightly) in the course of this chapter? Are we now in a new place at the end of it?

That disciplined way of thinking essentially never fails, but maybe there’s a more interesting way to look at it, too.

The way I’ve just phrased it puts the emphasis on the exterior. (Does Bond defuse the bomb? Does Lizzy Bennet get closer to her Mister?)

But what if we look at the same thing in interior terms? So the questions might shift to something a little bit more like these:

• What was my character’s state of wisdom / learning / emotion at the end of the last chapter?
• Have those things been altered (even ever so slightly) in the course of this chapter? Are we now in a new place at the end of it?

Obviously, that interior focus will work quite badly for some books. Any geo-political thriller shouldn’t really be too interested in Jack Ryan’s state of maturity and wisdom. Those books really do need to care, mostly, about saving the world. Likewise, crime fiction that’s written as part of a series can’t really do the Ascent to Wisdom journey time after time after time. (Yes, you can have some personal challenges / insights in each book, but they won’t have the scale and import of those in standalone novels.)

But a rule with exceptions can still be a pretty handy rule. If you’re writing a coming of age novel, or a romance, or really anything with an emphasis on interior development and learning, then this is a very handy rule to set alongside the other.

And just as you find familiar tropes emerging when you use the exterior rule, you’ll find familiar tropes emerging when you use this interior approach, too. For example:

• Your character faces a challenge. She trains and fails. She trains and succeeds. When the Big Challenge arrives, she is nervous but prepared.
• In a romance, your Mister is deficient. He fails with his future Missus. He works on that deficiency in some way and fails. Works again and succeeds. Everything goes swimmingly with the Missus.
• Your young adult protagonist has never really had an encounter with the other sex. But the girl/boy has some mission to do with a boy/girl, and they become highly engaged in that project, and then they develop feelings for each other... and that manifests as romance, not just as project work.

You’ll notice that in all these cases, the themes are learning, training, development, new accomplishments. I suppose that’s because those things are the nature of life, or at any rate the bits of life that a novelist is most interested in. And following these tropes just isn’t a negative. You’re not being unoriginal; you’re delivering to the reader the exact thing that brings them to the book in the first place.

And of course, you can have learnings of this sort that a character is only jerkily aware of. So let’s say that you have a 14-year-old girl training for a big karate fight. She can enter a chapter believing she’s going to lose. She can end the chapter thinking the same thing. That wouldn’t violate our rules, so long as the reader sees that some kind of transformation is happening, unaware of it though the character may be.

As a matter of fact, imperfect self-awareness in a lead character is a really excellent thing to make happen. It creates real texture in the book. You’re forcing the reader to read your character, not just your words – because yours words aren’t (directly) revealing what’s going on. Readers love those challenges, so the more of them the merrier.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Character blind spots

Again, there are two FF options this week. One for those taking the Plan Your Romance Novel video course, one not.

Plot Your Romance Novel video course task: Write a short profile of your ideal romance reader, including: the types of tropes they enjoy, what emotional experience they want from a story and what kind of ending they expect. Share this profile in the forum.  

General task: Show me a 250-word scene that exhibits a blind spot in your character. I do know that’s hard to understand out of context, so please be generous in giving us the context we need. Also, as ever, title and genre, please.

I’m happy with blind spots (a) where the character doesn’t see him/herself properly but those around them do, or (b) where the character and everyone else are in the dark. Just show us the character failing to understand him or herself. When you're ready, upload your stuff here.

Til soon. 

Harry

I run the Jericho Writers’ Self-Edit Your Novel course, which launched all the way back in April 2011. I built the course together with Emma Darwin and June will be our sixty-second group. We now have 717 alumni, well over a hundred of whom are published. If you want to see the evidence, have a look at the Hall of Fame on my blog.

Practical, not theoretical

So, what’s the reason for this amazing success rate? I’d say it’s because we impart general advice, techniques and guidelines in the detailed tutorials, but the exercises are based on your own work in progress. That means the course isn’t merely theoretical, it’s practical: we show how to apply the tools and techniques you’re learning to your writing, in real time.

Not only that, but students also see how to apply them to the work of the other eleven writers in their group. Through critiquing each other, you hone your editing skills at every stage – learning how to analyse and deconstruct a draft, seeing what works and what doesn’t (yet) and deciding what tools to apply to make it work better.

Each week, I give everyone very detailed feedback on their writing. People can then compare that with the feedback they’ve given and learn from it.

Transferrable skills

The skills you learn when you study the principles of self-editing are skills you’ll have for life. It’s not hyperbole to say that gathering the tools that enable you to stand back and analyse a draft will change your writing forever.

Many of our alumni are published with different novels from the one they were working on during the six weeks, but they all credit the course, acknowledging the difference it made to their writing.

Let’s break this down...

Structure, plot and pace

In week one of Self-Edit Your Novel, we identify what your story is and talk about where it sits in the market – but the main topic for the week is structure, plot and pace.

We talk about what readers are looking for on a first page, what they expect to find on the last page, and techniques for getting between the two. Once you know how to work out where your story begins, you then learn about ways to ensure the narrative drive never falters, and everything has a function in pushing your story forwards to the end.

Though we’re working specifically on your current work-in-progress, these are techniques which will be applicable to any future stories you write.

Crafting authentic characters

Week two focuses on character. Making your characters leap from the page is vital – after all, they are the readers’ representatives in your story.

Characters don’t have to be likeable, but they do have to be compelling. There are certain elements that apply to all main characters, in every story. In a group of twelve students, we always have a diverse range of characters, so you’ll see the importance of showing characters in action and the various techniques that ensure a character is compelling.

Voice: finding and refining it

In week three, the topic is voice. Your current work-in-progress might be in first or third person, past or present tense – or you might have a combination of voices.

Unless you’re writing a series, your future books will have a very different voice, so you need to train your writerly muscles to stretch in the direction that works best for each story you want to tell.

Given that we’re constantly told voice is the first thing an agent – or any other reader, for that matter – looks for on the page, the importance of understanding what constitutes a fresh and distinctive voice can’t be overstated.

Psychic distance: the gamechanger

Week four is the one most of our alumni describe as the gamechanger. The topic is point of view (POV) and psychic distance (PD).

Psychic distance is the most transformative tool in the novelist’s kit, holding the key to voice, POV, character, show and tell. It’s to do with how deep we go into characters’ heads and the extent to which their voices colour the prose.

In third person, this might be a matter of distinguishing between the voice of an external narrator – a storyteller, of some kind – and that of the character in whose POV we are. In first person, it’s about distinguishing between the voice when it’s in narrator-mode and when it’s in character-mode.

But this magical tool is infinitely flexible. It will apply differently to every story on the course and, once you understand the potential of using the PD spectrum to bring your writing to life, you’ll know how to apply it to any future projects.

The prose microscope

In week five, we put an extract from your draft under the microscope and analyse every word, every punctuation mark, every line break. We also talk about showing and telling, dialogue, adjectives, adverbs and rhythm.

This is the kind of fine polishing that you should only do once you’re preparing a final draft – but again, there are general lessons to learn that will apply to all your writing, not just your current work-in-progress.

Confidence beyond the course

By the end of the course, you’ll have the tools, skills and confidence you need to edit the current draft of your novel. More than that though, you will have learnt techniques that will apply to editing everything you write in the future. You can also revisit the content at any time, as you have lifetime access.

As an added benefit, your first drafts are likely to be in better shape than they would have been before you internalised what makes stories work for readers.

If you’d like to join us for round sixty-two (!) of Self-Edit Your Novel, we’d love to have you. Don’t forget: there’s a fully funded bursary place available for each course. Several of our previous bursary winners are already in our Hall of Fame, so please apply if you qualify.

If you’re not ready for an in-depth tutored course on this topic, why not consider Introduction to Self-Editing – a self-guided video course that will give you some basics to build on? It’s free and included with Premium Membership, or just £99 to buy as a standalone option.

EL Doctorow – a genius – once said, ‘Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’

And that’s true. Give or take a few extreme plotters, essentially no novelist knows the full route their book will take when they start out. Worse still, it’s extremely hard to know if all your effort is even productive. Are you making this trip in the fog to reach a dead end? Or to reach the kind of literary nirvana, represented by a literary agent and a modest book deal?

This email offers no solution.

But driving in fog is scary and it’s easy to get off track completely … or to be bang on track but spend your days worrying that you’re going wrong. So this email tries to address a fairly narrow question. Namely, what does it feel like when a book is going well?

So here are some things you may be feeling, and here’s what I think they mean.

“The bit I’ve just written seems poor. I’m not that thrilled with the bit I wrote last week either.”

If you have any feelings along those lines, I’d say they’re just par for the course. First drafts ought to feel a little ragged. If they don’t, you may be spending too much time editing and too little time plunging forwards. (I’m a big over-editor myself.)

“I’ve got a plot niggle that I haven’t been able to solve and it’s doing my head in.”

That too feels to me so commonplace as to be hardly worth bothering about. I mean, yes, you need to solve that plot niggle, but the fact that you have a plot problem just doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about whether your book is heading for fundamentally OK or fundamentally ’orrible.

Of my Fiona books, I’d say that only one plotted itself without much headache. The rest were pretty headachey at times. With the novels I wrote before Fiona, two or three were very headachey, one really wasn’t, and one was a total mess.

Only the total mess book was, in my opinion, a bad one … and even then, it sold well and ended up being nominated for an award.

“The book feels a bit laboured, a bit slow.”

It’s positive if you feel that. Your book probably is a bit slow, because you probably need to cut 10-20% of what you’ve just written. But that feeling says nothing at all about whether you’re on the right road. You can be perfectly on track and still have that feeling.

Just write that draft, then cut it. Easy.

“I really question whether this voice is right.”

That concern really matters. You risk going quite wrong if you don’t have the right voice from more or less the outset – just because a faulty voice will encourage you down lots of faulty pathways. That’s definitely one to fix first. Don’t neglect any concern along those lines.

“I just keep feeling unsure about whether this book even has legs commercially.”

That’s a feeling that, again, you need to inspect with real care.

One of my more popular books is a contemporary police procedural about King Arthur. (And, I know, modern police forces don’t normally have a lot to do with Arthur, but …)

I had plenty of plot challenges with that book. Not more or fewer than usual, but plenty. But although those challenges, I remained absolutely confident in my core idea.

That idea was essentially this: bad guys create a fake Excalibur and a whole trail of fake authentication for it. They want to sell their Excalibur to the highest dodgy bidder. Fiona figures out that the only way she can get face to face with the bad guys, in order to arrest them, is to make a fake Excalibur of her own, and then seek to sell that. She knows that bad guys have to take her sword off the market before they can sell theirs – and that essentially gives us the denouement of the whole story.

What I loved about the idea was the sort of double-switcheroo structure. That structure gave the reader three jaw-dropping moments:

1. Wow! They might have found Excalibur!
2. Oh! They’ve totally faked Excalibur and all the things that authenticated it.
3. What?? Fiona’s built a fake Excalibur of her own?!

Those things wrapped around normal crime-novel basics (a decent amount of corpses and personal jeopardy) plus the sheer merriment of dealing with Arthurian Britain told me that there was, in principle, a thoroughly entertaining and saleable book to be written.

So no matter how tough the plotting issues got, I knew that there was a shiny, bright and enjoyable book at the end of it. The book might be tough to write at times, but I grappled with those challenges knowing that there was a prize to be had at the end of it all.

If you can’t look at the core idea for your book and think, “Yes, this basically works,” then you risk putting in a vast amount of effort to write something that even in its best incarnation won’t tempt an agent. So: take care. And (I know I’m repetitive on this topic) make sure that the basic pitch for your book is sound.

“I absolutely love writing this book. I think about it when I’m walking the dog or washing up or (naughty me!) talking to my partner about admin.”

This is a superb sign, I think. Whenever that’s been true for me, one of my best books has emerged – whether fiction, or non-fiction.

You can write a good book without that feeling, but it certainly helps. A lot.

“I wish I weren’t alone.”

Well, yes, most people think that and it’s not a dumb thing to think. I do think that the Townhouse community should be a real part of your self-care routine here. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing or how good you are or precisely what your set of issues is. You’ll find a friend on Townhouse and someone who cares about exactly the same things as you do. (If you’re not a member, then do join. It’s free and easy.)

If you’re feeling like investing a bit more than nothing at all, then there are two basic options for you: mentoring and editorial feedback. On the whole, I advise against getting feedback until you are quite a long way down the line – simply because your own self-editing work will pick up most of what an editor would say. Once you’ve written the book and edited hard – that’s the time to get an editor involved.

With a mentor, it’s different. There, you really are asking a wise navigator-cum-friend to come with you on that journey through the fog. That mentor has a few advantages over you. For one thing, they’ve written successful books and know what you need to achieve to succeed. For another, they’re much less invested than you in the detail and in the emotion of writing, so they bring a kind of wise distance to their advice. It can, honestly, be career-changing.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Together and apart

Two FFs again this week, one for those taking the Romance course, one not.

Romance course version: Come up with a story seed for your novel using the formula: Trope + Sub-Genre + Situation.  For example: Second chance + Small-town romance + School reunion. If you’re not sure which direction to take your story, share up to 3 potential story seeds. Look at other people’s story seeds. Would you read them? Why/why not? Share in the forum.

General version: I enjoyed last week’s challenge,so we’ll just go again with the same one. Obviously pick a new scene to look at, but otherwise the challenge is the same again:

Most books have got some kind of romance in them – or at least a deep bonding experience of some sort. So: let’s see a key scene between your pair (250-300 words). It could be falling in love, or rejecting each other, or first meeting, or any other key moment. As always, provide us with title, genre and any context we need to make sense of things. Upload your stuff here.

Til soon.

Harry

Raymond Carver once said: "There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about".

Some of my favourite stories feature ‘ordinary’ or quiet lives: The Remains of the Day, for example. If you slow down and try to notice details, then the extraordinary can always be found in the ordinary.

Here are my top tips for hunting it out...

1. Be curious

Always, about everything. Not only what interests you, though – that’s easy! T

ake, for example, that person you hate? Spend time thinking about why you hate them. This might be your neighbour, a celebrity, a politician or your ex.

Do they behave in a way you find despicable? Why does it offend you? Have they wronged you? Or are you jealous – perhaps they have something that you want? If so, what is it?

Imagine them as a ten year old. Does this change the way you feel? Is there any empathy? Investigate your own likes and dislikes and be curious about those too.

2. Be in the world when you're out

Unplug often, but especially when travelling. Headphones off/out and phone away.

Instead of getting annoyed by waiting in a queue, why not observe everyone else? People-watching is easy these days because most people look at their phones, so you’ll easily fly under the radar.

You never know who you might meet on a bus, train or a plane, especially if you appear ‘available’. If you don’t want to engage with a stranger, then still… turn that device off. Invite your imagination out to play. Daydream. Get curious (see tip 1).

Listen to the couple opposite. How do you think they met? How long have they been together? What gives you that impression? What are they saying - and not saying?

Look for the stories around you or just out the window. If there are no people, let your self wonder who lives in those houses or tends those fields?

Why is that businessman speaking so loudly about his latest deal? What if (tip 3) no one is on the other end and he’s just faking the whole conversation? That person holding the flowers… have they received them, or are they giving them? Are they on their way to a hospital visit? A date? Planning to make an apology?

Jot down a sentence or two about a passenger, focusing on a specific detail that’s not obvious. Every time you do this, you’ll be creating a character bio you can use later.

3. Always ask: What if...?

The gap between real life and fiction is often just a question: What If?

For instance, people check their phones constantly - we take it for granted. But what if they’re waiting for life-changing news? Test results? What if that news never arrives?

Exercise: take an ordinary moment (the more universal the better) and jot down five different ‘What ifs’. The stranger or more unrealistic the better.

Example: The woman next door took in your Amazon package.

What if...

1. She refuses to give it to you?
2. She claims never to have received it?
3. She gives it back to you, but it's clearly been opened?
4. She claims a different neighbour has it - the scary neighbour?
5. She doesn't answer the door, even though you see her curtains twitching...

4. Variety is key

Step out of your routine when you can. Do you take the same route to work or school pick up every day? Do you always shop at the same supermarket?

We’re all creatures of habit, but with routine comes autopilot - and complacency. How can a surprising or original idea turn up if your day is predictable?

Try to surprise your subconscious by feeding it new experiences. Walk a different route. Go to a different supermarket or library or cafe. Get a train just one stop away from where you live and spend a few hours wandering. Write down any impressions that come to you.

And encourage variety in your actual ideas, too. Sometimes combining the unexpected and/or illogical is what leads to interesting and surprising ideas. (It’s why the TV show Breaking Bad worked so well!) What if your local W.I. group was made up of ex-cons? Maybe that local bakery is actually a criminal operation?

5. Focus on emotions, not events

Readers connect with how something feels, not just what happens. Think about the last time you felt something strongly. What emotion was it?

Even if it was only for a moment – road rage for example – try to describe the emotion without mentioning what happened.

Can you list the physical sensations? The thoughts? Try and make up a fictional scenario that creates the same feeling in a character.

6. Consume stories

This might not be by reading! Stories aren’t just in films, plays and TV shows, but also in gaming, songs, art, museum exhibitions...

Observe and record what you’re drawn to. Ask the people in your life what stories they’re drawn to, especially in a medium you’re not familiar with (your teen's into gaming for example – but what is it about Life is Strange or The Walking Dead that they enjoy?).

Love the fashion at the V&A? Maybe there’s a story waiting to be written about someone who wore one of the costumes? Or the person who commissioned or made it?

Fill up on stories, recognise them everywhere - and soon your brain will be primed in all the tips above!

E.L. Norry will be appearing at the 2026 London Festival of Writing, chairing the Idea Generation: Harnessing Your Creativity workshop on Sunday 14 June. Grab your ticket here!

The best and worst kind of rejection in publishing is always the same. It’s any variation on, “I thought this was really impressive, but it’s just not for me.”

It’s the best possible rejection: you were close!

It’s the worst possible rejection: you have absolutely no idea of what you need to fix.

So it’s worth laying out a couple of things here.

The first is that there are meaningful and broadly objective standards of excellence.

Those standards look different as applied to, say, historical romance than to literary fiction, but the standards are pretty clear, nevertheless.

If you give the same manuscript to any two Jericho editors (and it’s happened now and again, either by accident or because a client has specifically asked for it), the two editors will say broadly the same thing. Yes, there’ll be a roughly 20% margin of variance. Yes, there will be some different emphases or ways of explaining things. But you could look at each report and realise that it wouldn’t be all that hard to create a single unified document on which both editors would basically agree.

It’s the same at the agency level. It’s not that hard for agents to weed out the ‘definitely not’ manuscripts (some of which may be Really Pretty Good, but this is a world where RPG is not enough.)

It’s also not that hard for agents to pick out the blindingly good manuscripts. Yes, there are famous exceptions, but they’re famous precisely because they’re relatively rare. It’s also true that agents can reject a book for a million totally innocuous reasons (“I’m just too busy”, “I’m trying to move away from this kind of fiction” “I represent an author who’s just too similar.”, etc)

On the whole, it’s fair to say that if you produce a really excellent manuscript, in line with what the market for that kind of book is at the time, agents will generally (and subject to the kind of reasons just noted) grab the book with both hands.

Same too at the publisher level. Here the reasons for rejection can be more complex. Does the proposed new title fit on the list? Have they already made an acquisition which would fill that hole? Does the editor have the level of authority and persuasion to build in-house support for a title?

Some of the reasons for rejection are worrying, not innocuous. In the good old days, editors had a fair amount of autonomy in terms of which books to acquire. The marketing folk were there to sell the books the editors had bought. These days, and for good reasons, it’s not like that. Everyone chips in. Marketers are more inclined to play safe. If a book looks risky, they’ll maybe prefer something else. It doesn’t help that, while the editor will have read the whole book, others on the acquisition committee may have read no more than 50 pages (plus the editor’s summary, setting out the case.)

But in summary:

• Yes, there are broadly objective standards on which most competent pros would agree;
• Yes, there are, at every stage, local factors which will influence whether you get a yes or a no.

Broadly speaking, if you get your manuscript out to 10-12 agents, you’ll override any temporary, local factors and get a proper read of the market as a whole. When it comes to publishers, there just aren’t that many big publishers, so you have to go to the ones who look just about right for your book. Quality does normally win out.

All that said, there’s another factor in play here.

Does someone actually like your book?

An editor doesn’t have a shortage of books to choose from. It’s not enough that they admire your book and rate it as excellent. This person is actually going to have to spend time with it – and with you – and with your next book – and maybe a number of books after that. Do they want to do that?

With agents, it’s the same but even more so. Lots more manuscripts to choose from. Generally, much longer relationships too.

Now, yes, everyone wants to make money and do well in their careers. So, in a good way, not a bad one, agents and editors tend to bend their definition of “Books I actually like” to conform, more or less, to the set of “Books that will actually sell.”

But that’s only a partial bending. If an agent admires your book, but it doesn’t really hit their own personal tastes – well, that agent may not be right for you.

And all of this just ends up telling us two things:

This game is hard.

Spread your bets. Approach 10-12 agents. Get those agents to pitch to multiple publishers (which is, any event, their default choice, almost always.)

Oh yes, and one more thing:

Write well, edit hard.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Together and apart

Two FFs this week, one for those taking the Plot Your Romance Novel video course, one not.

Plot Your Romance Novel video course version: Write a short concept (300–400 words) describing your idea for a potential romance story. Who are the characters? What brings them together? What keeps them apart? Share in the forum.

General version: Most books have got some kind of romance in them – or at least a deep bonding experience of some sort. So: let’s see a key scene between your pair (250-300 words). It could be falling in love, or rejecting each other, or first meeting, or any other key moment. As always, provide us with title, genre and any context we need to make sense of things. Upload your stuff here.

Til soon. 

Harry

I first joined Jericho Writers in about 2015. I’d just started writing that story I’d been carrying around in my head for years, but I knew nothing about writing, and not one person in the writing world. I was also recently redundant, at home with a baby recovering from critical illness, and grieving my mother’s death. So ‘getting out there’ wasn’t an option - but Jericho Writers gave me a whole world of writing advice, helped me feel less alone, and reassured me I wasn’t entirely bonkers to be doing this - trying to create something beautiful - because it turned out lots of other people were doing the same thing, meaning at least we were all the same kind of crazy.

When I got to the end of the first draft, I hadn’t the first clue what to do next. Most importantly I wasn’t even sure I’d written a real book. I come from a background of poverty and addiction, which had left me with the ingrained belief that someone like me doesn’t get to write. So when I booked a manuscript assessment, what I was asking before anything else was – is this a real book?

I can still remember the day the report came back - it’s one of the few days in my life I can honestly describe as life-changing. My husband had just returned from a work trip, I was exhausted from solo-parenting three small children, and then Philip Womack's report arrived. And it was so thoughtful, encouraging and above all kind, that for the first time in my life I had an attack of vertigo. I couldn’t see straight, and like a Victorian lady with her fainting couch, I had to go lie down. It meant that much to me, that someone else had read it (all of it!) and put together so many insightful suggestions on how to make it better. (It’s why I always say that if I could only have one kind of writing support, I’d pick a manuscript review because it’s laser-targeted on your writing and what’s holding your story back.)

After that report, it looked at first like I might be one of the lucky ones – I re-wrote the story based on the feedback and found an agent in London; only for the book to fail on submission, and the agent to leave the agency, sending me right back to square one. But I still believed in the story, so I edited it again, submitted it directly, and this time got a two-book deal with a small fantasy publisher. For a year then, I worked with them on editing, copy-editing, type-setting - only for the publisher to go bust on publication day. Leaving me with one book (sitting on pallets in a warehouse somewhere), a draft of a second book, and no home for either.

During this time, Jericho helped me keep going – I went to the Festival of Writing and had the best time, feeling simultaneously supported, (a smidge) envious, but also inspired. I went to a self-publishing day in London and appreciated so much, how hard they worked to demystify something that scared the pants off a techno-klutz like me. But I decided to give traditional publishing one last try, found a new agent and went on submission in 2023 - not knowing that in the interim the market for romantic fantasy had exploded thanks to books like Fourth Wing. Meaning that after a mere eight years of rejection my series was in demand, and in 2024 we signed a three-book deal with Penguin Random House. Since then it’s sold in multiple territories, and when it published in March, it was a bestseller in Ireland, the UK and the US.

But absolutely none of this would’ve happened without that first manuscript assessment; it gave me the confidence to believe I’d written a real book people might want to read. And that initial belief helped me keep going through years of rejection because I knew I had the kernel of something worthwhile; and it was getting better with every iteration as I slowly, painfully, learned my craft.

And if I had to take one piece of advice from those years of rejections, rewrites and resubmissions: it is that editing is a super-power. Writing in itself is already a form of magic, because it lets you turn the inchoate mess in your head into something beautiful. But editing, I’ve learned, is that, squared. A way of taking the very best of your ideas, sentences, words - all bubbling up at different times, often over many years, but which, when edited down together on the page, creates something that’s the best of you across time.

Though I started and stopped many times, it wasn’t until the year I turned forty that I actually completed a whole novel. After consulting the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, I sent it out to six agents. One of them got back to me almost immediately and asked to see a full copy of my manuscript. For the next three weeks, I was floating on air. I thought I’d made it.

When the reply came, it was a pass. Although the agent liked the premise, and my writing, the novel itself needed too much work for her to offer to represent me. I came back down to earth with a big bump. Then I read her email again. Alongside the ‘no’, she’d given me some detailed advice about what the novel needed and she’d been really encouraging to try again.

That’s when I realised that the real work comes in the editing.

Over the next eighteen months, I took the Self-Edit Your Novel course with Jericho Writes, read books and blogs on novel writing, pulled the whole story apart and put it back together again with all I’d learned. This time, when I sent it out, I got an email from Bookouture within two days and – a week later – signed my first three book deal.  From that process, and through working on another eighteen novels with Bookouture, these are five things I’ve learned about self-editing.  

Begin with a Bang

The first chapter is so important for hooking your reader and giving them a taste of what they can expect from your story and writing style. Before sending off a manuscript, ensure that your first chapter is your best foot forward. Have you started in the right place in the story? Is there enough action? Are you hooking your reader with a question they will want answered? Is there a promise of conflict? An element of mystery? A protagonist they will enjoy spending three hundred pages with? Is it clear what your character wants to achieve?

Up the stakes

Once your reader is clear what your protagonist wants, they will need to know what the consequences are if they succeed or fail in achieving it. The bigger those consequences, the bigger the impact on the reader. When you are editing, ask yourself how you can increase the danger for your protagonist. Where is the jeopardy? When will the reader be shouting at them to do, or not do, something? Raising the stakes will elevate a good story into a great one. Consider the threats to your character’s survival, relationships, security and sense of self.

Hit the beats

Writing two books a year, I find it hugely helpful to have a detailed plan for my story before I begin. If you’re more of an organic writer and prefer to build the story as you go, it will be during the editing process that you wrestle your manuscript into shape to ensure that your story is hitting the beats in the right order at the right time. This is vital to avoid having ‘saggy’ sections in your novel which might cause readers to stop reading. The two books which have taught me the most about story structure and the beats of story are John Yorke’s ‘Into the Woods’ and Jessica Brody’s ‘Save the Cat Writes a Novel’ and I still refer back to them both for every book.

Cut, cut, cut

Stephen King wrote that you need to ‘kill your darlings’ if they don’t serve the story. When you know you’ve spent hours (Days? Weeks? Months?) of time on a scene and you’re really proud of the prose, it can be very hard to cut it. But readers want a plot that keeps moving, characters who keep evolving and everything has to serve the theme of your story. Take each chapter in turn and ensure that the reader learns something new in that chapter or that it moves the story on in some way. If not, it needs to go.

Polish your Prose

Look for unnecessary filter phrases – she thought that, he knew that, they believed that – which can create distance between your character and your reader. Be vigilant for any ‘tics’ that your characters have developed – nodding heads, rolling eyes, lumps in throats all lose their impact if they’re repeated – and any that you have as a writer. I know that I have a tendency to overuse the words ‘so’ and ‘really’ in my dialogue. So, I really make sure I check for that. (That one was on purpose.) All of these can creep into a first draft without you realising it.

Feeling inspired? Join our best-selling Self-Edit Your Novel course with Debi Alper on the 16 June. Last few spots available!

Last week in the happy land of Feedback Friday, we took a look at passages that writers had switched from present to past tense, or vice versa.

A couple of things struck me. One was the number of people saying that they disliked the present tense. Absolutely no one said the opposite. I’m in rather low-key agreement… agreement rather undermined by the fact that I write in it. 

The other was the weird way that the present tense somehow invites the kind of off-key writing that the past tense doesn’t. In particular, really weird things seem to get personified and made the centre of things. Take this (invented) snippet: 

I am running fast, feet pounding the road. Sweat gathers under my T-shirt on this hot night, and dark patches start to appear on my upper chest. 

Now that, I think you’ll agree, is the sort of writing you quite often encounter in first person. And it’s weird. All of it.

Take the very first bit: I am running fast.

That sounds like a Russian trying to speak English and getting muddled with our multiple present tense option. Surely it would be more natural to say, I run fast. The tense there is just as much in the present as the first version, but it’s not waving a banner saying, ‘Look how very present tense I can be.’ It’s a way – quietly and neatly – to transmit the information you want to communicate. 

And then: feet pounding the road.

Assuming that you are on a road to start with, I challenge you to run in any way other than one that involves feet pounding road. You can’t do it. This is empty, pointless text. But somehow people writing in the present feel the need to add things like this. I think the impulse is something like, ‘I need to be immediate and present and descriptive. I need to make the reader feel what it’s like to run on a road at night.’

And OK. I’m all for being immediate and present and descriptive, but just don’t do that in a stupid way – a way that’s as daft and unnecessary as ‘I breathe big breaths, using my chest muscles and diaphragm to rapidly inflate both lungs, allowing me to draw oxygen into my surging bloodstream.’ 

Next, we have: Sweat gathers under my T-shirt on this hot night.

This bit is still weird. If you wanted to call attention to your sweat, you’d probably say, ‘I’m sweaty.’ You’d make yourself the subject of the sentence, not the sweat. And although the ‘gathers under my T-shirt’ bit isn’t quite as empty and pointless as the feet ‘pounding the road’ bit was, it’s still very pointless. Sweat isn’t really going to gather above a T-shirt, is it? 

The same thing can be said of the next bit: dark patches start to appear on my upper chest. 

Again, the speaker is not the subject. The speaker seems to have been pushed out of their own experience, in favour of body parts, sweat and T-shirts. As a matter of fact, it’s unlikely that anyone running hard will pause to pull the top of their T-shirt out to see if there’s a dark patch at the neckline. So the point of view character here is someone jumped out of the speaker’s own body – which is plain nuts. 

Something else happens here as well. Because the subject is pushed out of their own experience, ordinary descriptive writing seems to vanish. 

In practice, if you’re running hard down a dark street, a good part of your attention is with your surroundings, not with your T-shirt. So you’d probably say something like:

The road is lit by dim orange streetlamps that seem only to thicken the shadows. The sea, to my left, is visible only as an uneasy grey restlessness, an animal moving out of sight.

That’s maybe a little bit fancy, depending on what kind of book you’re writing, but I hope it strikes you as perfectly acceptable. And notice this: 

1. You didn't even notice what tense it's written in. It doesn't matter. 
2. The subjects of these sentences are the road, the lamps and the sea - all of which are inanimate, none of which are the narrator, and none of which have anything to do with body parts.
3. And yet - because the narrator is seeing these things, experiencing them as he/she runs, because they're a natural part of the narrator's own viewpoint - these sentences actually stick more closely to the narrator's point of view than all those sentences about road pounding and sweat ever could.

The lessons?

Well, the lessons are to stick with your character’s point of view in a natural way… which generally does not involve making list of body parts and what they’re doing at any point in time. 

And yes: that lesson has nothing at all to do with the present tense itself. The present tense is an innocent bystander, a spectator at the drive-by shooting. The real culprit is weird writing; people suddenly deciding that they have to write weirdly, just because they’re writing in the present. So don’t. Just write normally, and in whatever tense you choose. 

Here’s our original passage in a perfectly acceptable present tense:

I run as hard as I can. The road is lit by dim orange streetlamps that seem only to thicken the shadows. The sea, to my left, is visible only as an uneasy grey restlessness, an animal moving out of sight. I’m running hard, but at a pace that I think I can keep up, till the road ends and the I reach the shelter of the dunes.

And there we go. No weirdness. All present tense. All perfectly centred on the character’s own experience.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY // Body parts

Find a chunk of text that has too many body part / clothing / sighing-nodding-shaking-panting type references. Then rewrite it in a way that doesn't make me want to rip my own teeth out.

Let's see before and after, please. Max 250 words each passage. As always, please give us title, genre and any context we might need. When you're ready, post your work here.

If your writing is already perfect, then give yourself a spoonful of salted caramel ice cream and take the week off. 

Til soon. 

Harry