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We’ve spoken in recent weeks about opening your novel. (Why so obsessed? Because of the Ultimate Start course.)

(And – to put two brackets back to back, which is pretty sinful in almost any context – I should probably mention our Festival of Writing, which is … well, it’s pretty obvious what it is. We’ve already sold a lot of tickets, so I wouldn’t hang around too long on this one.)

But have done with parentheses.

Openings only exist so you can, many thousands of words later, create an ending. In film-lore, those opening and closing images need to resonate with each other. It’s as though the story of the film is all there in those two glimpses.

You can see a compilation of opening & closing shots on Vimeo here (you may need to create a free log in if you don’t already have one.) But one example will maybe suffice.

In the film 1917, the opening shot shows two soldiers resting, in sunlight, against a tree. The field beyond is full of flowers. The two men look peaceful and relaxed.

The closing shot shows one soldier – one of the two from the first frame – resting in sunlight against a tree. The other soldier isn’t there: he’s been killed. And the remaining soldier isn’t peaceful or relaxed: he’s exhausted and haunted by what he’s just been through. And this field, though essentially a similar sunny French pasture, has no flowers in it.

That’s all powerful enough in itself – but the symmetry of the two shots says one further thing to the viewer as well: and now we’re back to the beginning. We go again. This never stops. The meaning of the closing image is immeasurably darker than the first.

And novels?

Well, novels are bigger and more complicated than films. I don’t think that, in general, there needs to be this kind of direct conversation between opening and closing shot. I suspect the rather literal reflection I’ve just mentioned is rare.

That said, however, stories are stories. They need to have a purpose. A sense of something accomplished by the preceding narrative.

So, Pride and Prejudice starts by telling the reader that Mrs Bennett is anxious to see her girls get married – and does so via the famous line about a truth universally acknowledged.

The book ends, of course, by marrying Lizzie off to a gazillionaire. But just as the opening chapter dwelled on Mrs Bennett’s feelings about all this, the closing chapter starts there too: ‘Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters.’

There’s a mirroring here again, as well as a sense of the narrative arc. Opening: not married + underlying anxiety. Closing: Married to Mr Handsome-Rich-and-Honourable + all-round yippee-dee-doo-dah.

Last week, we took a look at an opening chapter of one of the FG books, in which we established:

1. Fiona is nuts (she can’t hold a basic conversation about jeans without comforting herself with memories of serious road accidents)
2. She’s deceitful: she thinks about road accidents, but doesn’t reveal her inner life to her friend.
3. She’s somewhat less than human in all this. Not failed exactly – but someone who is rather less than those others around her: other people could have managed this chat; Fiona’s performance was limping, at best.

Now, my book is not the sort of book that closes with a triumphant chat about jeans or new shoes, in which Fiona shows herself a master of small-talk. But the closing scene does show a kind of before-and-after comparison. It’s not that Fiona has changed – she hasn’t – but we do get to see a side of Fiona that compensates for her other deficits.

By way of context, in the course of the book, Fiona saves the life of a Ukrainian multimillionaire’s daughter. The rich guy offers Fiona some thank-you money and she (rightly and properly) says no. But he doesn’t immediately accept her refusal, saying:

‘The money is in Switzerland. Very safe. Very private. Very, very private.’

I say nothing.

‘Eleven million dollars.’

He looks at my face and the light changes and the cedars still don’t move and he gives a slight shrug and says, ‘I send you the details.’

And only then do I move.

I shake my head and say, ‘Mr Zhamanikov, I cannot take your money and my “no” really does mean no. But there are some criminals behind this whole thing—’ I wave my hand at the big house, the house where Aurelia is a prisoner of nothing more than her own head, her own past. ‘Perhaps we will catch those men in conventional ways. In the ways of police officers. Ordinary regular law enforcement. And I hope that’s what happens. But sometimes . . . sometimes, we fail. Or rather . . .’

I taper off and Zhamanikov murmurs, ‘You might need a little help.’

I echo his phrase. ‘Exactly. We might need a little help.’

Yuri gazes at me with those steady eyes and gives, again, that half-shrug. ‘OK. Then when you are ready, you give me call.’

We leave it there. The whole thing arranged as simply as calling a cab, booking a table.

The woman who carefully protected her inner life from her jeans-discussing friend is preparing to be deceitful here on a massively larger scale. She thinks she might need some cash to bring down the bad guys. Here’s someone offering eleven million bucks. And she’s happy to take it – and to conceal that fact from her colleagues in the police and, in fact, from essentially everyone. She’s not taking the money for herself. But cops aren’t meant to do those things and she blooming well does.

So she’s still deceitful.

She’s also kind of nuts too – or at least, she’s acting here far, far outside the norms of society. She shouldn’t do what she’s just done, but we know she’s not about to change her mind.

But then we need to consider the less than human bit.

Fiona has had cause to consider the seven deadly sins in the course of the book. She acquits herself of most of them, but says:

It’s the two remaining vices that give me pause.

Ira, wrath. Superbia, pride.

The two sins whose names that night filled my mouth with an awful silence.

Am I a proud and wrathful person? Was it my pride that led me down that footpath alone? Was it the boiling heat of my wrath what enabled me to do to Anselm what few people ever do to another in their lifetime?

And it is not the first time. I own it. These things fall in patterns and I deny neither the pattern nor its dark consequences. My preference for working alone. The bloodshed which so often results.

Anger and pride.

Is that less than human, or more than human? Well, naturally that’s for the reader to decide but, in the course of the book, Fiona has single-handedly – and through her own intelligence, resourcefulness and courage – defeated a particularly nasty kidnap ring. She’s happy to give her own self-summary, in very direct terms:

I confess this.

I am a woman of pride and wrath, and my soul is troubled.

I have asked for peace and peace has not come.

I have sworn at an abbot and rubbed caustic lime in the eyes of a man I almost liked.

I have done these things and I am that woman: prideful, wrathful and without truth.

I am that woman. And I repent of nothing.

So there we have an echo between opening and closing image – not in a literal way, but in the way that a reader will nevertheless intuit:

Opening: Fiona is nuts, deceitful and somewhat less human.

Closing: She’s nuts, deceitful and both simply human (flawed) and magnificently more-than-human (a wrathful angel of justice.) She’s also declaring herself satisfied to be the person she is – implicitly including her terrible-jeans-chat in that declaration. The ‘repent of nothing’ statement includes the violence she has just done to others, and includes her hopelessness with Bev a few hundred pages earlier.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that literal mirroring makes much sense in novels. I mean: if that’s the way things happen to fall out, then fine. Just, I don’t think you have to force that outcome.

Also: I never look back at my opening when I write my ending. The ending just comes as it does. It feels right if it honours the entire preceding narrative. I don’t feel that the closing scene has to curtsey backwards to the opening one.

And also: films are visual and external. The landscapes of the novel can be both external (descriptive of the exterior) and internal (describing the human soul). The result is that the echo in a novel doesn’t have to be as literal as man-lying-against-tree. The echo can be much less directly physical.

All that said …

Yes, I think you probably should feel some echoes between opening and closing. The kind of echoes we’ve just highlighted here. Not too crass. Not too obvious. But there nevertheless. A sense of journey done, distance accomplished. To all those of you who have completed Ultimate Start, I bow to you. Well done. We will be on a new topic next week.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Final Polish

This is the last of our six weekly Feedback Fridays where we pick up the theme from Ultimate Start. Today Sam Jordison requests – or, to be honest, demands with menaces – that you, “Give your opening 500 words a final polish using everything you’ve learned.”

The link you need to post your work is here. 

Oh yes, and you do remember that the Ultimate Start is Ultimately Pointless unless you Ultimately complete your novel to a very high standard. I think I know a programme that might Ultimately Help with that.

Til soon.

Harry

Last week, I said that I thought that genre-communication and authority were the two essential things to achieve in your opening pages. I thought that you were unlikely to miscommunicate genre, in which case your task now comes down to that communication of authority.

A low key opening

So this week: a worked example. I’ve chosen, for that example, what may be the most boring opening page I’ve ever written. But not bad-boring. Just low-key-boring. Here it is:

‘Well?’

Bev runs her hands down her hips and gives me a wiggle.

‘Well?’

I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.

‘My jeans. They’re new.’

‘Oh.’

Now I know where my attention’s meant to be, I know how to focus. The jeans are a kind of washed-out indigo. Skinny-cut. Low-waisted, but not ridiculous. Slim dark leather belt, discreet scarlet buckle. The jeans are close-fitting enough that Bev’s phone makes a hard, flat shape in her back pocket. When I did a spell in Traffic, during my first two years in the police, and I was just a regular uniformed copper like everyone else, I remember an accident victim with very tight jeans, who suffered multiple fractures to both femurs. We had to cut her out of those jeans to get at the wounds. One of the paramedics did it with a scalpel, handling the blade delicately enough that it made only the finest pink graze down the girl’s thighs. Two parallel tracks pricked out in dots of blood.

‘New jeans,’ I say. ‘They look great! Where did you get them?’

‘It’s not about where I got them,’ she chides me mildly. ‘I’ve dropped a whole size. These are a ten.’

She gyrates again, and now I know what to say, I say it with enough enthusiasm and repetition that Bev is satisfied. We finish getting changed and troop through to the chirpily upbeat cafe, where we get fruit smoothies and pasta salads.

Thoughts on the above

So: we have two women, talking about jeans. That’s not interesting to a third-party in any context, but it’s certainly a quiet start to a crime novel.

Does this matter? Well, some authors will think it does. That’s why you end up getting those (yukkety-yuk-yuk-yuk) openings where unnamed Bad Guy slowly tortures someone (usually a woman) to death, with the whole thing related in a horribly voyeuristic way.

And, OK – there are plenty of readers out there and they all want different things. But you certainly don’t have to take that kind of (slightly desperate) route in your fiction.

I said my start was quiet, and it is, but it has a crackle to it all the same.

Here’s the opening dialogue again:

‘Well?’

Bev runs her hands down her hips and gives me a wiggle.

‘Well?’

I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.

‘My jeans. They’re new.’

‘Oh.’

Bev clearly wants a response from Fiona, hence the repeated ‘Well?’ – not just a question but, in its second appearance, a slightly annoyed demand.

Fiona is clearly clueless. This is a standard woman-to-woman interaction, and Fiona has no idea what to say. She ends up saying something inoffensive, but almost devoid of meaning.

Bev (who knows Fiona and her general uselessness) then feeds her the prompt that other women might not have needed.

Fiona acknowledges this new information and gets ready to re-analyse. Here’s how that analysis proceeds:

The jeans are a kind of washed-out indigo. Skinny-cut. Low-waisted, but not ridiculous. Slim dark leather belt, discreet scarlet buckle. The jeans are close-fitting enough that Bev’s phone makes a hard, flat shape in her back pocket.

That’s all accurate enough and sensible enough, of course … except that (a) this chunk reads like an unnervingly complete police description of an item and (b) completely misses the element that Bev will want to know about: do these jeans look good on me?

Fiona’s human-radar then goes even further awry:

When I did a spell in Traffic, during my first two years in the police, and I was just a regular uniformed copper like everyone else, I remember an accident victim with very tight jeans, who suffered multiple fractures to both femurs. We had to cut her out of those jeans to get at the wounds. One of the paramedics did it with a scalpel, handling the blade delicately enough that it made only the finest pink graze down the girl’s thighs. Two parallel tracks pricked out in dots of blood.

That tells us two things, I think.

The first is that Fiona is obsessed by all things police-y and, perhaps more accurately, all things corpse-y or at least near corpse-y.

The second is that there’s something about a fashion-related conversation (however unchallenging) which does Fiona’s head in. The mental jump to bloody road accidents is her way of self-soothing.

But the next bit of dialogue doesn’t allude at all to the mental processes we’ve just witnessed. Instead, we get this:

‘New jeans,’ I say. ‘They look great! Where did you get them?’

‘It’s not about where I got them,’ she chides me mildly. ‘I’ve dropped a whole size. These are a ten.’

That is: Fiona is blatantly code-switching. She’s learned to keep the weirdness of her actual thought-processes away from others and she does so here. She doesn’t do it very brilliantly. (Her only fashion comment: “they look great!” That’s hardly Vogue-level analysis.) But she does just enough to stay on Planet Normal.

In practice, her attempt is still not good enough. Fiona has failed to notice the thing that Bev has been desperate for her to notice, so Bev has to offer still more guidance in an attempt to get what she needs.

Fiona then has enough data to do what she should have done from the very first and this episode closes with the pair of them going to the ‘chirpily upbeat café’ in the gym:

She gyrates again, and now I know what to say, I say it with enough enthusiasm and repetition that Bev is satisfied. We finish getting changed and troop through to the chirpily upbeat cafe, where we get fruit smoothies and pasta salads.

Observations

Things to notice in all this:

1. Genre

There’s not a massive allusion to genre here, but there’s enough. That allusion to the road accident victim already puts blood on the first page – and there’s a clear hint here that there’ll be plenty more to come, and not just via a non-crimey road accident. Given that readers already basically know what kind of book they’ll be reading from the title, cover, blurb, etc, the genre indicators here can be really quite low key.

• Elevator Pitch

My books are about a detective with a – uh – complicated mental life. This first page already establishes that just fine. Most women can talk about jeans without thinking about broken femurs and scalpels. Fiona can’t. That fact is established without much fuss. We don’t need fuss. We just need the smell of that core pitch very early. And here it is, neatly tied off in those ‘parallel tracks of blood.’

• Dialogue

The first “authority indicator” comes in that opening bit of dialogue. The whole opening bit only amounts to 30 words, but we already feel the pull (of Bev’s desire for praise) and the push (Fiona’s blank failure to understand what she needs to deliver.)

That push-pull – tiny and inconsequential though the conflict is – tells the reader This author knows what he’s doing when it comes to these trivial things. You can probably bet that he knows what he’s doing when the stakes get bigger.

• Character complexity

Another “authority indicator” comes in the presentation of Fiona. We have here – in only 250 words – at least four different versions of our heroine:

1. Person attempting to engage in girly dialogue, albeit badly
2. Hyper-professional police officer, able to instantly deliver an accurate and complete description of clothing
3. Nutcase, who gets troubled by (a) and whose comfort-place involves rather gruesome traffic accidents.
4. Nutcase who, knowing she’s a nutcase, keeps the loopy thoughts firmly trapped on the inside as she valiantly attempts to re-enter the scary world of Girly Chat.

And that’s it. For me, that opening page is low-key but perfectly sufficient. Any reader reading this will be reassured that this is a crime novel, and will have confidence in my ability to tell the tale.

To be sure there’ll be plenty of crime readers who really don’t want this book. Maybe they want something more immediately violent – or more immediately cosy – or written with less authorial fol-de-rol. And good: you don’t want readers who don’t want you. They won’t finish your book. They won’t give it good reviews. You don’t want to sell to people who aren’t going to be all in for you.

And yes, a low-key opening is OK – really OK – a don’t-worry-about-it OK. But you do need to ramp up before too long.

In the next scene, Bev and Fiona meet two male police officers, one of whom Bev massively fancies. The one who Bev fancies suggests they all go out for a drink, and they do. (‘I’m thinking, ‘No, absolutely, definitely not,’ but Bev is saying, ‘Yes, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Fi?’ and throws me her female-solidarity look hard enough that it’s probably sticking out between my shoulder-blades.’)

Then (1800 words into the book, or about 5 paperback pages) one of the officers gets a call that he has to respond to. Fiona’s the only cop there who hasn’t had a drink, so she volunteers to give him a ride. Before too long, they get to a massive hoo-hah near Brecon. (Overturned chemical lorry, with lots of very yukky smoke coming out.) And, better still as far as Fiona’s concerned, a corpse found in a remote village (2500 words into the book) … and, with all the local cops busy with their burning chemicals, it’s Fiona’s job to go and attend the scene.

So the opening page itself is low-key, but:

1. The genre is clear from the off
2. The elevator pitch is also immediately present
3. The authority signals (for “my” sort of readers) are also clear
4. The reader still only has to read 5 pages to get a sense that the story is now properly underway … and maybe 7-8 pages to find out what that story actually is.

That’s it. That’s all you need. Now go away and do the same.

Or, better still, take The Ultimate Start course, and do the same.

FFEDBACK FRIDAY / Conflict, stakes and reader curiosity

This week's Feedback Friday task is from Emma Cooper, one of our tutors on The Ultimate Start. It's this:

Share the scene in which your inciting incident takes place.

When you're ready, post your work 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? 

Til soon. 

Harry

Why is it that the most commercially successful genre in publishing is also the least culturally respected one?

It’s a conundrum that has haunted romance writers like Cathy haunted Heathcliff; since Darcy met Lizzy. (BTW, I know that Wuthering Heights is not a romance novel. Please don’t write in.)

Romance fiction has, for many decades, been a quietly thriving genre, turning over roughly £20 million a year in sales in the UK alone. This exploded during and after the pandemic and continues to grow exponentially – thanks, in part, to the early democracy of the BookTok community on social media platform TikTok, and the unashamed devotion of a new generation of readers.

Romantasy – love stories set in fantasy worlds that are loaded with magic as well as sexual tension – has swept through fevered imaginations like magical wildfire. Onyx Storm, the third in Rebbeca Yarros’s Empyrean series is the fastest selling adult novel to be published in the last twenty years. Hot and spicy forbidden encounters, like the viral TikTok sensation Twisted Love by Ana Huang, have also thrilled readers around the world.

Elsewhere, high concept romantic comedies starring smart women with brilliant minds, like Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, have made us laugh, aspire and fall in love with the meet cute all over again. In the UK, authors like Jessica Stanley, (Consider Yourself Kissed) Beth O’Leary (Swept Away) and Saara El-Arifi (Cleopatra) are helping shape this revival, alongside the authors who have been giving us beautifully crafted, quality loves stories for decades: the likes of JoJo Moyes, Jenny Colgan, Katie Fford and Veronica Henry. (Oh, and me!)

Suddenly, what publishing has long considered a bit niche and low prestige has become an engine with many moving parts – and it’s keeping the publishing and bookselling industry going, virtually single handed.

We who love to read and write romance have good reason to be thankful for Gen Z’s unashamed adoration of the genre. But underneath all the bells, whistles and dragons, we know one thing is fundamentally true…

We love to fall in love on the page.

We need to escape reality (which is increasingly unappealing) and explore our own feelings, hopes and desires through the safe harbour of romance fiction.

So why is reading romance so often referred to as a ‘guilty pleasure’? What is there to be embarrassed about? The answer, of course, is NOTHING.

The power of love, including romantic love, is central to the human condition. Since Plato considered the intrinsic need for humans to find their other half, the subject of falling in love has fascinated philosophers, writers and artists. So when did exploring these ideas become something to be looked down on, joked about and sneered at? I could write a long essay on reasons that might have something to do with the patriarchy… Instead, I’m just going to celebrate the many reasons why the perception of romantic fiction is changing, as well as why it matters now more than ever.

Romance is the most inclusive and diverse genre I know. All stories, your love stories, are welcome here. Yes, romance give us swoon-worthy book boyfriends/girlfriends/elves – but it also gives us a space where hope is in action. Where self-discovery is pro-active, and where people of all identities can foster agency and innovation.

Romance fiction is, so often, activism too. It shows the way to break down hate with love – to see the humanity in all people, even people you think you detest (see the ‘enemies to lovers’ trope!) Romance allows us to imagine a world that has a happy ever after. Twenty-first century romance in particular is about empowering readers to make decisive choices that often require great courage and empathy. It’s a genre that fully deserves the increasing levels of respect it is garnering.

In short, reader, I do believe that romance can save the world.

So… If you’ve ever thought about writing romantic fiction, or are in the middle of writing the kind of love stories that you long to read, now is the time to seize the day. Add your story to the wonderfully happy and delightful army of romance novels that are lighting up the globe with love.

Let’s save the world together.

Feeling fired up? Join Rowan on our inaugural Writing Romance Novels course, starting 11 May 2026.

Graham Bartlett talks about the art of tricking your reader... and no, you don’t have to write crime or thriller novels to find it useful. Drawing on his thirty years as a detective and his experience as a crime writer, he shares five practical techniques to up your storytelling game.

Back in the day, I was a detective. For nearly thirty years my job was to investigate crime and catch criminals. I was OK at it, not the best but then again not the worst. After all, they kept me doing it, even promoting me a few times, so I must have had something about me. 

Now I am a crime writer which means I’m also an avid reader, I go to events, I mentor and teach other crime writers; I’m fully immersed. However, once I reveal my previous profession people bestow me with mystical powers. The number of conversations I have which go along the lines of, ‘Well if you didn’t guess the killer I must have hidden them well,’ (possibly, but I never work it out); ‘Can you be on my murder mystery team as we’ll be a shoe in then?’ (I was once on one with a former home secretary, everyone put their faith in us and we were appalling) and ‘You must have plots and twists coming out of your ears,’ (nope. I have to work as hard as everyone.) 

How so, you might ask? Well, it’s a completely different task. When I was catching criminals, I relied on witnesses, forensics, technical evidence and even the odd admission (yes, there were one or two.) The job was knowing where that evidence might lie, finding it then packaging it for interview, charge and eventually court. 

Finding a killer in crime fiction is  far more subjective, so writing it should involve more trickery. Unless you want it all out on a plate you are unlikely to craft a fictional murder with five eye witnesses, four sources of the suspect’s DNA together with damning CCTV, phone location data and the suspect’s vehicle triggering Automatic Number Plate Recognition to and from the scene. Instead you need to seed subtle, seemingly meaningless clues throughout. You should shine a light on pointers which beef up your red herrings while having the real suspect hidden in plain sight. 

S.S. Van Dine’s rules of detective fiction may not survive in the modern age but they do make the point that, as authors, we must play fair with the reader. There is nothing I like more than being surprised by a reveal or plot twist, then to go back and slap my own brow for missing all the breadcrumbs laid out for me which, even being a former detective, I had completely overlooked. 

When I’m writing, I leave worrying about those clues until the second or third draft. I pepper the OMG moments only when I know for sure what’s going to happen and who’s to blame. 

How do you do that then? As ever, read as a writer and see how the experts do it (yes, Agatha Christie, I’m looking at you) then try it for yourself. It takes practice and honest beta readers who will highlight any giveaways, but here are five techniques to trick your reader, but within the rules: 

Bury your clue in mundane detail 

Example: After the murder, your killer runs through a forest tripping over roots and snagging his clothing on branches. That is never mentioned again but a torn jacket gives them away in the final act. Then it dawns on the reader how it was ripped. 

Show your clue from the wrong perspective 

Example: The detective notices a suspect nervously rubbing their hands. She assumes guilt. Later it is revealed that they had a medical tremor so we discount them. But the real clue was that they never once asked who the victim was. 

The "absence" clue. 

Example: Classically, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Silver Blaze, this is the famous "curious incident of the dog in the night-time," where a dog's silence reveals the culprit. The dog did not bark because the thief was someone it knew well, proving the theft was an inside job. 

A seemingly innocuous act becomes significant 

Example: The small woman is removed from the crashed car, then the scenes of crime officer moves the seat forward to examine underneath it, indicating that the seat would have been too far back from the pedals for her. Therefore she couldn’t have been driving but was placed in the car after the fact. 

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.

I’ve written a few books of non-fiction, and had a brilliant time doing so (with, erp, maybe one exception). And one of the things that really stuck in my head came from my agent.

We were about to pitch a book on the basis of a short proposal: basically three sample chapters + an outline of the whole book + the book’s introduction. I had thought of the intro as being the least important part of that package, but my agent told me no, it was crucial. I had to think of it, he said, as a manifesto for the book. A declaration of intent, but one that also laid out an argument to the reader: “Here’s why this topic is so important / interesting, and why you won’t be happy unless you buy this book.”

So I took my intro more seriously and rewrote it. We took that proposal out to market. By that point, I was fine with the chapters themselves and had a good, strong introduction. I was much blurrier about the actual outline, though – so I fudged the issue, and wrote an outline that kinda looked like a proper outline. It had all the right headings, but it was deliberately cryptic. My actual intentions as to content remained obscure.

Thanks to my agent’s insistence on getting the presentation right, we got a couple of huge offers and accepted one of them. We then had a Woo-hoo-we’re-so-excited lunch with the publishers at a posh place in London, and after an hour or so, I said, “Guys, the book outline I gave you was kind of cryptic. Don’t you maybe want to know what this book is going to be about?”

And yes: they did – and I told them – but they didn’t really care. They bought the book, and were happy buying the book, without knowing much about what was going to be inside it.

The point is:

1. They trusted my manifesto-style introduction. They thought, “Gosh, yes, this is an interesting and important topic which will engage plenty of our readers.”
   
2. They looked at my three sample chapters and thought, “Yep, this guy can write and this is the kind of material that will engage a broad audience.”

That was it. They didn’t need more. They trusted me (rightly) to do the rest well.

It’s much the same with the opening of any book – novels, included.

Obviously, you don’t open a novel with something that sounds like a manifesto… but that’s more or less what you’re doing anyway. You’re saying to the reader, in effect, “You like novels that are [literate / suspenseful / raunchy / funny / weird / whatever] and this novel is going to completely satisfy that desire in you.”

Those opening pages constitute a promise (“here’s what’s on offer”) and a convincer (“And boy, it’s going to be good”) all in one.

Now, plenty of writers are seduced into thinking that they can only achieve those goals via the sort of gimmick that opens a Bond movie: masked gunmen, alpine setting, ski chase, huge cliff, certain death … but wa-hey – Union Jack parachute opens and theme music begins.

That approach works for Bond movies and it works for some novels, but it’s not compulsory. The only elements that have to be there are:

1. Genre promise. You have to announce, accurately, “this is an xyz kind of book” – a police procedural, a literary novel, a hist-fic epic, etc. Most books don’t fit into a clearly defined genre, of course, but they still have to announce their niche. “I’m a funny, book-club style novel about relationships and loneliness in a digital age.” You’re giving co-ordinates to the reader, and those co-ordinates must be accurate. (That’s why those Bond intros work: you know exactly what kind of film you’re about to watch – a promise made, then kept.)
   
2. Authority. You need to convey authority. You need a reader (who may not have read any of your work before) to think, “Yes, I can trust this person to deliver the promise that is being made here.” And again: authority doesn’t need ski chases and parachutes. When you walk into a bank to take out a loan, you wouldn’t feel comforted if your putative lender were dressed in a yellow ski-suit and spouting double-entendres. The way you need to display authority will vary according to the book you’re writing.

And of these two, the key is authority.

Not many of you are going to falsely signal “gory, Nordic horror novel” when the book is actually going to turn into a sun-drenched rom-com, set over a Provencal summer. So, in effect, it’s authority you need to worry about.

And?

Well, now is a good moment for me to remind you that The Ultimate Start - our latest self-paced video course - is running at the moment. There are well over four hundred of you already taking it (I’m staggered), but you can easily jump in, if you’re a latecomer. The course is £49 if you’re not a Premium Member, but it’s as free as the wind, if you have the wisdom to be a PM. The aim of the course is to get your novel started on the right track – and of course to introduce you to our Ultimate Novel Writing Programme tutors, in case you’re thinking about taking that most excellent course. 

Next week, I’ll talk about how authority can be made to work on the page – with or without ski-chases, yellow jump-suits and plenty of men-in-black getting shot.

FFEDBACK FRIDAY / Setting the scene

This week's Feedback Friday task is from Philip Womack, one of our tutors on The Ultimate Start. It's this:

Rewrite your opening 500 words, this time trimming any unnecessary backstory or description. 

When you're ready, post your work 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? 

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 Eleven is all about the self-publication route and author-led marketing. I have self-published a trilogy of three books. I learned a tonne. And now, I’m aiming for a traditional publishing deal with a small or independent press. 

That might sound like a contradiction - especially in a month where we’re talking about the power of self-publishing and author-led marketing. But for me, this isn’t a rejection of self-pub. It’s the result of having truly lived it. 

I did the experiment. I ran the numbers. I stood on the other side of my three respective launch days and asked: Is this the life I want as a writer? 

And now I have my answer, I’m headed for traditional publishing. Why? Well, in no particular order: 

1) I write literary fiction: My work probably isn’t going to compete head-on with highly commercial genre fiction that sells in big volumes and lends itself nicely to series. Never say never - but realistically, the manuscripts I’m producing now feel better suited, more at home, with a small or indie press. 

2) I’ve already proven what I needed to prove: My first book reached #1 in 14 Amazon categories across four countries - the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia - on publication day. It has since revisited #1 in Canada. That bestseller ribbon meant something. It still does. 

But what mattered more was what I learned about visibility: how to get strangers to notice a book, buy it, review it, and then come back for the second one. I’m always happy to be transparent about what that required - in terms of money, time, and emotional energy. Suffice to say: I did it, I got the t-shirt, and that chapter of my life is complete. 

3) I want to focus on being a writer first: Traditional publishing gives me the greatest chance of being single-minded about story. Self-publishing - brilliant as it is - requires you to also be a marketer, data analyst, strategist, and brand manager. I’ve worn those hats. Now I want to hang them up. 

4) I want longevity: I want to be in this world for a long time. Talking about books. Talking about writing. Building a small but deeply engaged readership - not expending attention and effort chasing the next algorithm shift. And I’m incredibly lucky: I now have a job that allows me to live inside this writing world every day. It’s taken the pressure off my manuscripts to “perform.” I can give myself time to grow. 

The reality behind my bestselling ribbon? I published my first book in 2017. Back then, Amazon categories were pretty hidden and murky. I paid someone to help me analyse them because you had to know which questions to ask. The goal? To be a big fish in a very tiny (but valid) pond on publication day. 

Today, tools like Publisher Rocket make that easier, but the principle is the same: strategic positioning. 

Then came launch day. I worked my friends, family, colleagues — anyone who would listen. The book was discounted to 99p. I made 217 sales across the globe, which was enough to reach #1 in those carefully chosen categories. 

Later boosts came through BookBub advertising — an excellent tool — but my ROI remained negative. 

This isn’t a complaint. I had a ball. But it taught me something crucial: selling a book is not magic. It requires attention, focus, skill, analytics, and upfront investment. Exactly what any publisher must invest. 

And that knowledge? It changed me. 

So, would I self-publish again? No. Definitive no. 

The work I’m doing now through the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is aimed squarely at traditional publishing. 

My last three manuscripts tell their own story. One has had 63+ rejections and now lives in a drawer. One is currently querying: one full request, twenty rejections so far. And now, there’s my UNWP work-in-progress.  

What if this one also faces the same fate? Well, I’m currently ‘composting’ two more novels. I’ll begin again. Because I now understand where my energy belongs. 

Self-publishing gave me clarity. It showed me what can threaten to stop me turning up to my writing - and what always brings me back to the keyboard. It taught me where my emotional boundaries lie: what is within my control, and what never will be (hello, agent submissions). 

So, my goals are simple and stubborn: become the best writer I can possibly be and stay around long enough for success to have a chance to find me. 

That’s where author-led marketing still matters to me — not as a hustle, but as a slow-building relationship with readers. A long game, not a launch spike. 

This month’s focus on self-publishing and author-led marketing isn’t about pushing one path. It’s about giving us the full map. The Ultimate Novel Writing Programme doesn’t sell fantasies. It teaches us students how the industry really works - across all routes - so we can choose with clarity instead of hope, and with strategy instead of fear. 

I’ve walked one road already. Now I’m choosing another - eyes wide open. And that, to me, is the real gift of this course. 

Rachel Davidson was 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. She is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

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

Month Ten is all about getting published via the traditional route. All routes under this umbrella expect some form of submission package: a query letter (more likely an email), a one-page synopsis and an extract of the beginning of your manuscript – often the first 3 chapters. 

So, all I have to do is take my years of writing — the head-in-hands moments, the hours spent staring into the middle distance, my constant, chronic fear of the delete button — and package my story into a nice, easy to ‘get’ product statement. Simples, yes?  

No, not really. But bear with... because it really is important that we learn to approach the publishing industry with our eyes and hearts happily open. 

I’ve been honing my writing craft for over ten years now. My last-but-one completed manuscript collected sixty-three submission rejections (I stopped sending it out because I’d run out of suitable ‘open to submission’ agents). The manuscript currently doing the querying rounds is up to over twenty ‘thanks but no thanks,’ responses. I plan to give it a total of at least sixty-four chances of rejection.  

I have also entered many book competitions over the years and driven myself mad with hope that this one will see value in my writing. On longlist announcement days, I was not easy to live with. I stopped counting the competition entries, having eventually wrangled my hopeful heart into more of a ‘think of the entry fee as a donation to the writing community at large and forget about it,’ approach.  

At various moments in these ten years, whilst crafting and sending my stories out into the world, I have felt incredibly foolish, laughably ridiculous, beyond ‘past it’, alienated from the latest ‘in crowd’ and somewhat demoralised by the whole process.  

Which, I think, simply proves I’m a rational human being. Even seriously accomplished writers find the packaging of our artform somewhat grotesque. Take my Ultimate Novel Writing Programme tutor, Andrew Miller, a twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author. When we talked about elevator pitches, he placed his tongue firmly in his cheek, and said what I reckon every single novelist throughout history has thought at some point: if I could summarise the whole novel in just one sentence, why did I bother to write the novel? It was wonderful to hear a respected author speak aloud the market’s strangeness – the nigh on violent act of having to compress a novel into just one or two sentences. 

But art has always lived inside markets, whether I like it or not. All serious writers have engaged with this reality and endured it with their eyes open. This need to package, whilst it feels antithetical to ‘art’, does sharpen the work and is a vital necessity. 

The often-unspoken truth about The Submission Package is that the elevator pitches, synopses, and comp titles aren’t actually about the book. No: they’re about helping tired, overworked humans decide where to place their attention. That doesn’t make submission packages very noble beasts, but it hopefully makes them more understandable. It’s not about ‘selling out’ your hard artistic effort. It’s about translating it so it can intrigue.  

So, though not easy, embracing the task of distilling my book forces me to be clear on what the story is about. Naming its core ethical and emotional question strengthens my commitment to that question on each page, within every sentence. Choosing suitable comparison titles situates my story within a living conversation - the same kind of useful shortcut to deep impact that simile and metaphor offer within prose. Working on my submission package means my book knows itself better, and its artistic impact can only grow because of that.  

Pulling together a whip-smart submission package, finding the right agents, and choosing the best route into traditional publication are all vital, pragmatic actions that authors have to take.  

Over the years, I have had the great fortune to be exposed to the wisdom and expert advice of other writers in all guises – not least, peers who understand what receiving hundreds of rejections each year feels like. I have had conversations and practical support which has kept me turning up to my writing, even when the vast silence from ‘Publishing Land’ has made me doubt my sanity.  

If I may, therefore, I’d like to leave you with one further thought: publication is a deeply uncertain thing, but community never is.  

Rachel Davidson was 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. She is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

When I knew I wanted to write a book, it wasn’t the idea, or the vocabulary, or the fact that I didn’t think I was good enough that was stopping me; it was the question of how I would ever find the time. Back then, I was working full-time and had four children. I barely had a chance to have a relaxing bath at the end of a long day, so what chance did I have of writing a whole novel? 

What I eventually realised was that I was waiting for a perfect pocket of time: a clear desk, an empty house, candles burning… but that version of ‘writing time’ was a myth. It was never going to happen. Instead, I wrote for half an hour in my lunchtime, and another half an hour when I got home. 

Most writers don’t struggle with ideas. They struggle with finding the time – or rather, the belief that writing needs more time than they have. 

I didn’t magically find more hours in the day; I just stopped waiting for those perfect writing circumstances that would never come. 

These are my top tips for making writing achievable, even when it has to compete with work, health, caring responsibilities, or Peppa Pig in the background… 

1. Set realistic targets  

Realistic being the keyword here. If you say to yourself, ‘Right, come hell or high water, I’m going to write 2000 words today’, great! Go you! Look at you setting the bar high. 

But let’s say you have a meeting that runs over, or one of your kids pukes all over your laptop. Come the end of the day, you haven’t even opened the thing, let alone written a word. 

That pressure you’re putting on yourself? That sense of failure? It’s the enemy of creativity. Writing a book thrives on momentum, not punishment.  

Smaller, achievable goals will keep you coming back. That’s how your book will get written. 

2. One line is better than nothing 

Let’s be honest, if you write one line a day, and only one line a day, it will take you a long time to write a book. But momentum beats volume. Every. Single. Time.  

That one line? That might be the line that hooks an agent. It might spark an idea for a twist. It might simply remind you that your book exists. Either way, that’s progress; you can’t edit a blank page. 

Does that one line need to be written on your laptop in tranquil surroundings? No. It could be on the back of a receipt, a napkin, a takeaway carton. It still counts. You’re still writing a book.  

3. Decide in advance when you’ll write 

Now, this might sound contradictory given what I’ve just said… but there will be moments when you can carve out a block of time. Even if that means getting up an hour earlier than usual, or going to bed an hour later. Beth O’Leary wrote The Flatshare during her commute to and from work.  

The key isn’t to say ‘I’m going to write a whole chapter at half past five in the morning’. It’s committing to getting up a bit earlier and opening the document. What you want to do once that document is open is up to you. You might want to research, or tweak what you’ve already written. You might stay in bed and think. It all counts. 

Protecting this time in advance will take away the daily battle with yourself – the question of ‘Will I/won’t I work on my novel today?’. This is your writing time. Be all L'Oréal about it. You’re worth it. 

If you'd like more invaluable insights and supportive advice from Emma, you can join her on the next intake for the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme or the Novel Writing Course. Fancy meeting her or another tutor 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.

Today –

If I’m honest, then –

That is to say, if I were to sum up all that I have to say on this Furiously Fun Friday on this Jaunty January morn, then –

Why –

I have nothing. My pockets are empty, the cupboard bare. Even the cat has a sad and solitary look.

I was not burgled. No one robbed, pilfered or mugged my words from me.

But –

I had a stock of words and -

Last night I gave them away. To you. I gave them to you.

Now, if you were One of the Many who came to last night's Elevator Pitches webinar, then I salute you. I hail you. I give you a plump and quivering partridge to do with as you wish.

If you were not, well, NO PARTRIDGE for you. I am not in the habit of giving out BIRDS to those who make not the slightest effort to –

But we’ll not quarrel. If, let us say, you were last night detained by an unfortunate youth in need of help in his journey to Ouagadougou – or Albuquerque – or Ystradgynlais, then you did the right thing by not attending. And your no show DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL.

That's because you'll be able to watch a FREE replay of the workshop next week, once our small team has had the chance to put it online. We'll include the link in next week's Tuesday Newsletter and post it on Townhouse. You'll need to sign up as a member of the community before you can watch - but again, that's free, free, free. 

I think that the ideas contained in yesterday's webinar are the most important, and amongst the most overlooked, in the whole of the writer-craft universe.

If you get your core ideas right – well, honestly, the rest of it is just basic competence and hard work. If your core ideas are feeble, no amount of competence will ever see you home.

What’s more, when it comes to selling your book (traditionally or as an indie author), the book with the strongest core pitch – the best DNA – will always win and should always win.

I often talk about an elevator pitch, but I get hesitant about that term.

On the one hand, I like it because if you only had 20 seconds to describe your book, you’d want to cut to the thing that will most excite the listener – will force them to ask you for more information.

On the other hand, a think a lot of writers think, “Ah yes, I’ll write my book, then I’ll find some glossy slogan to stick on top of it, and that slogan will surely, surely make people want to buy it.”

That’s the thought I want you to discard. Any marketing slogan needs to flow straight from the core idea of the book. The cover flows from the core idea of the book. The title, your query letter, all the marketing yadda – that all flows from the core idea of your book.

And the text! Your text! That too comes from that same cold, sweet spring. When all those things line up behind a clear compelling proposition, then success beckons.

So get that proposition right. From the start ideally, but from right now if you’ve not properly thought this through already.

If you came to the webinar and offered a pitch or asked a question, then thank you. If you didn’t, then do watch the replay.

It is, as I say, probably the most important lesson I ever give.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The instant hook

This week's Feedback Friday task is from Holly Seddon, a tutor on The Ultimate Start course. And it's this:

Identify what the hook of your novel is and share in the forum along with your 500 word opening taking into account what you have learned so far. Before posting check for any energy or intrigue drops.

When you're ready, post your work 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? 

Til soon. 

Harry

Gyamfia Osei is a literary agent at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Named a Bookseller Rising Star in 2024, she has built a list of award-winning and bestselling authors writing from middle-grade and YA up to adult fiction.

Gyamfia represents children's and young adult (YA) genre fiction as well as a select list of adult commercial fiction and narrative non-fiction. Here, she offers a range of insights and actionable tips to support authors working on YA novels – but as is always the case with great advice, most are applicable to writers of any genre.

1. Know the market, but lead with authenticity

When it comes to writing young adult fiction, there can be real pressure to tick off whatever tropes are currently dominating the market — enemies to lovers, 'not like other girls', love triangles, and so on. But for readers, it's usually clear which stories come from a place of authenticity, and which are trying to chase what the author believes is ‘working’ right now. 

It's worth remembering that once a book is sold to a publisher, it often won't reach shelves for 12-18 months. By that point, today's popular tropes may no longer be what readers are gravitating towards. Instead of writing to the market, focus on what generally excites you. What kind of story would you want to read? Authenticity almost always resonates more strongly with readers than trend-chasing.

2. Get into your character's head

Strong plotting and immersive worldbuilding are important in young adult fiction, but voice is often what first grabs the reader’s attention. Before you even start writing, take the time to get to know your central character — or characters — inside and out, so their voice(s) shine through. 

First person remains a popular choice when writing young adult fiction because it allows the reader to form an immediate connection with the protagonist. Readers don't need to like them, but they do need to understand them. And before that can happen, you as the author need a deep understanding of who they are, what drives them, and how they see the world.

3. Lean into emotions

There's a reason why books like The Hunger Games, Heartstopper, and A Good Girl's Guide To Murder have built such devoted fanbases. They're very different stories, but they share one crucial element: emotional depth. 

The teenage experience is defined by heightened emotions — love, jealousy, anger, joy — and capturing that intensity on the page is what makes young adult fiction so powerful. When you're writing the big plot twist or dramatic moment, don't just focus on the what. Dig into the how. How does this development affect your characters emotionally? How might a teen reader see themselves in these reactions?

4. Let your characters lead

Trust your characters to make their own decisions without needing an adult to constantly step in and show them the way. Teen readers want to watch characters test boundaries, make mistakes, and work things out for themselves. 

Teachers, guardians, and mentors can guide and support, but the most meaningful choices should belong to the characters themselves. Even poor decisions can be powerful, as long as they feel earned and contribute to the character's growth. 

5. Stay true to teens, if they're your audience

The line between adult fiction and young adult fiction has become increasing blurred in recent years. Adult readers (including myself!) are reading down, and teen readers are reaching for the adult shelves. While this has created exciting commercial opportunities for books with broad appeal, it also means that we need to be mindful of protecting stories written specifically for teenage readers. If young people are your target readership, keep them – and their needs – firmly in your sights.

Writing with young adults in mind might involve considering appropriate ‘spice levels’ (code for how much intimacy is shown on the page), but it more often comes down to character journeys.

Ask yourself whether those journeys feel relatable, authentic, and emotionally engaging for a true teen reader. When that connection is there, YA fiction can be at its most powerful. 

Want more advice from Gyamfia or one of the other literary agents we work with? Book an agent one-to-one session to get feedback on the first 5,000 words of your novel, your query letter and your synopsis. During a friendly, supportive call, you’ll receive constructive advice on honing your submission pack, plus insight on your novel’s commercial potential from an industry expert.

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!

Ray Bradbury, the author of Farenheit 451 and much else, was a fan of the future. A fan of boldness and technological adventure. 

In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business because we’d be cynical: ‘It’s gonna go wrong.’ Or ‘She’s going to hurt me.’ Or ‘I had a couple of bad love affairs so therefore …’ Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.” 

That cliff-jumper is you. It’s me. It’s all of us. 

It’s certainly true for any first-time novelist. My first book was a giant 180,000 words long. (And yes, it went to print at that length. And no, it’s not a length that publishers are especially looking for. But if a book is good enough, the length is kinda immaterial.) 

I was naïve. I literally had no idea that writing a book and getting it published might be hard. I just assumed I could do it, and would do it. My track record (Oxford University, fancy American bank) was one of achievement. I knew I liked reading. I’d always assumed I’d end up being an author. So: write a book – how hard could it be? I knew how to write a sentence, so just do that over and over, and I’d have a book. 

Everyone receiving this email is less naïve. The tone of voice needed for a fast commercial adventure-caper was not the same tone as that had produced success in Oxford philosophy essays. Once I’d written 180,000 words, I looked back at the start and realised it was … ahem, in need of vigorous editing. The kind of editing that involved selecting 60,000 words and hitting Delete. So I deleted the rubbish and rewrote it. Wrote it better. 

But: 

That wasn’t a failure. It was the second most important step on the road to success. The most important was writing the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter. The most important step is always the same: it’s jumping off the cliff in the first place. 

Deleting 60,000 words was the next crucial step: acknowledging that what I’d done wasn’t good enough; that more work could fix it; that I needed to design and use some better wings. 

But you don’t get to the better-wing-design stage until you’ve got to the plummeting-downwards-out-of-control stage. You need them both. 

And honestly: the challenges probably get a little bit less as you write more books, get them published, get paid, learn the industry, build a readership. But each book is its own cliff – its own well of uncertainty. 

As you know, I’m a huge believer in nailing an elevator pitch before you start writing. I don’t care about pretty formulations – I don’t mind whether you have the kind of phrase that would look good on a book jacket or movie poster. But a list of ingredients that would spark interest in a potential book-buyer? That’s essential. 

But oh sweet lord, there is a huge gap between knowing that you have, in theory, a commercially viable novel and actually making it so. I have sometimes written books that flowed, start to finish, with no huge mid-point challenges, but those have been the exception. Mostly, there’s been a hole – a gap – a problem. 

I’m not a huge fan of pre-planning novels in vast detail. (But do what you like: it’s whatever works for you.) The only way to find that hole is to leap off the cliff. It’s the flying through the air that tells you what wings you need. 

So jump. 

Be uncertain. 

Jump anyway. 

Take the biggest boldest leap you can, knowing that you don’t have the answers. 

Just jump. 

Jump knowing that your wings aren’t ready. They get born by jumping. Wings that surprise you and delight you and complete you. 

So jump. 

Good luck. And happy Christmas. 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Sharing your darlings 

It’s Christmas. So – take the day off – or the week – or the fortnight. 

Eat mince pies until your eyes bulge. Eat until you smell of chestnuts and nutmeg. Give presents to your kids. Wear baubles in your hair. Hide chocolate coins in your garden, then dig them up with a five-year-old watching in wonder. 

And – well, hell, if you want to be Christmassy with your fellow writers, then share your darlings. Choose any 250-300 word passage that you really love, and share it. Give feedback to others. When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Spread joy. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

As the year draws to a close, we wanted to pause, take a breath, and say one very important thing: 

Thank you. 

This year was shaped by you showing up. Showing up to the page, to the live sessions, to the writing rooms, and we’re so proud of what this community has achieved together. 

Here’s a snapshot of what was accomplished in 2025: 

107 success stories celebrated 
Across our Premium Members, course alumni, and editorial clients, we celebrated 107 writers who went on to have books published, sign with literary agents, and place in competitions. Watching your journeys unfold never gets old and is the best bit of our jobs. 

5 brand new Premium Member courses released 
This year we added five new courses (that are totally free to our Premium Members) to support them at every stage: 

• Write With Jericho 

• Introduction to Crime Writing 

• How to Get a Literary Agent 

• Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction 

• Introduction to Self-Editing 

136 live online events hosted 
Including 16 industry insight events with literary agents and 19 feedback events, all designed to give you access, insight, and practical next steps. 

4 intensives held 

We hosted Getting Published Month, The Write That Book Bootcamp, Build Your Book Month, and the Writing Retreat, giving our writers even more opportunities to learn, create, and connect. 

72 hours spent in the writing room 
Quiet focus. Shared accountability. Real progress. These hours mattered. 

Over 1 million words read 
That’s how many words were submitted to our First 500 competition. It was an extraordinary reminder of just how much talent exists in this community. 

312 writers welcomed to the London Festival of Writing 
A highlight of the year, filled with learning, connection, and the kind of creative energy that stays with you long after the weekend ends. 

6 bursaries funded 
Because access matters. We were proud to support low-income writers in continuing their writing journeys. 

Launched our revamped Townhouse community 

Our new and improved community space has given writers a place to collaborate, share, and grow together, making our collective creativity even stronger. 

Every number above represents real people, real effort, and real belief in the power of stories. Whether this was the year you finished a draft, signed with an agent, attended your first live event, or simply kept going when it felt hard, it all counts. 

With thanks and excitement for the year ahead, 

Becca, Head of Marketing & Membership

The market for books is weirdly open and weirdly opaque, both at the same time.

It’s open in the sense that you can walk into a bookshop and see which books are being heavily promoted (front of store, price discounted), which books are being merely sold (round the side of the store, spines out), and which books – too often your own – aren’t being sold at all.

You can also pick up any book to get a rough measure as to critical acclaim and any sales records the book may have. On Amazon, you can go one better and get an actual sales rank, brought up to date every hour.

It’s really easy to get captured by these things. “So-and-So’s Book X is doing really well, so I should make mine more like that.” “Famous Author Y always writes along these particular lines, so I should do the same.”

But those conclusions are dangerous and often completely misleading. So, to mention just a few issues:

1. A book may have pride of place on a bookstore’s sales table, simply because a publisher has paid for it to be there. The book may be selling badly and be actively loss-making and be generating despondent “where did we go wrong?” type meetings at the publisher.
   
   
2. A book may become a bestseller, simply because enough supermarkets have bought and then discounted the title. Those supermarkets have the sales power to create a bestseller – footfall is the single most potent sales tool there is – but the retail buyers making the acquisition probably never read the book before buying it. So, what you’re looking at is not much more than a random effect. (That said, you do probably need to have sold your novel to a Big 5 house, via an agent, even to place a stake at that particular roulette table – so in that sense, it’s very not random.)
   
   
3. Amazon sales rankings are hugely responsive to quite small changes in sales. So, for a book to gain or lose 10,000 places in a day is common. For books with lower sales, a shift of 100,000 places may well signify extremely little in practice.
   
   
4. Critical acclaim can be carefully manufactured by a publisher. That and sales outcomes are two very different things and in most cases publishers will only care about the latter. And critical comments are very carefully culled. An ambivalent piece with a single strikingly positive phrase will be clipped down to that phrase alone. Additionally, by the time a consensus builds, critics are nervous to do their job. So, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro is obviously a terrific novelist… but it’s also obvious that his Dark Ages novel, The Buried Giant, is kinda awful. No one ever dared say so, though.
   
   
5. A US bestseller can flunk in the UK and vice versa. People often try to analyse what it is about US tastes that differ so much from UK tastes – but a big point here is that outcomes in traditional publishing have a large component of pure, random luck. I’d say a really strong title matters. And no book becomes a lasting bestseller unless it has some genuine merit. But plenty of good books flunk. If your title is bought by the US and the UK, then great: you get a seat at both roulette tables. But the spins are separate and outcomes are only weakly correlated.
   
   
6. A book that does amazingly well online may never find any meaningful print sales at all. I can think of a UK crime author whose digital sales (via a digital publisher) ran very quickly into seven figures. A print deal soon followed, and it was assumed at the time of signing that a big print bestseller was the natural outcome. But it wasn’t. The print book did OK, but it was nothing like the runaway success of the digital one.
   
   
7. A famous author doing very well at his/her game may not mean anything at all about whether that particular market is a good one for you. So, let’s say that you notice a new Dan Brown or John Grisham novel making headlines and grabbing sales slots. You might think that producing weirdly written novels about secret codes is a good game to get into – or that the world badly needs another legal thriller. But the point is that DB / JG have now created their own genres: people who like Dan Brown / John Grisham books. The JG reader may well read no other legal thrillers and certainly not be desperate to find new authors in that niche. You essentially can’t tell anything at all from the current sales history of more established authors.

So, what do you do? How are you meant to navigate?

One piece of advice – widely offered – is just to write to please yourself. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s foolish. Yes, you need to please yourself. And yes, you need to find joy and satisfaction and meaning in what you write. But you also need to make sure that there’s a market for what you write. Opaque as the books market is, you do still need to interrogate it for whatever lessons you can learn.

Here are some rules which are, I think, dependable.

Look at recent debuts. The books that are making their debuts today are books that were acquired by publishers (roughly) 12-18 months ago. Without being a literary agent, you can’t know much about more recent market activity, so those debuts are your best bet. Don’t just look at the promotional chatter about those books. Try, if you can, to find any data on whether the books are considered to have sold well. If a publisher bought a book 15 months ago and is making good money from it today, it’ll want another book in the same broad genre.

Know your genre. The best – really, the only – way to understand movements in the market for your genre is to participate fully in that genre, as reader. To consider the whole romantasy genre, for instance – to understand what’s ‘current’ there – means reading widely in the genre. I’m not a big fan of slutty faeries, so my guess as to what to write in that genre would offer absolutely nothing by way of insight. But if you read what others are reading, then the book you want to read next is probably the one you want to write. You’ve effectively turned yourself into the Ideal Reader for your novel.

Don’t just think about your genre. If psych thrillers are doing really well commercially, then your historical espionage novel with an unreliable narrator fits into the same broad cultural trend.

So read widely. Pay particular attention to recent successful debuts. Read in your genre and out of it. Write what you love – and what there’s a market for.

And?

And don’t be seduced by shiny chatter and sales blurbs. Those things deceive as often as they inform – and actually, probably, a lot more often.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The big random thumb

OK, I don’t want to know if you have a shiny opening to your book, or if your battle scene is great. This week we’re going to do the Big Random Thumb. Basically: does your book look strong enough when we just search out a perfectly average passage? Is there something there to convince a reader that you’re worth trusting?

Give me page 42 from your manuscript. If you want to jiggle the start a little bit in order to find a chunk that has some coherence out-of-context, then fine. But not much jiggling – the less, the better. Page 41 or 43, if you don’t want to start at page 42.

250 words total, please. As usual, title, genre, and a line or two of explanation. I’ll pop my own page 42 sample up on Townhouse too, so you can take a look at what the Big Random Thumb finds with me.

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

Til soon.

Harry

(This is not an opening; this is a parenthesis.

You may skip it, if you wish – you may metaphorically flip the page – you may prefer your cup of cocoa and your comfortable slippers – but,

You skippers, flippers and people in slippers,

You may CRIPPLE your chances of novel-writing GLORY if you don’t grab the LAST CHANCE to take out an annual Premium Membership at a stonking 30% off.

I suggest that you:

1. take out the membership,
2. commit to taking at least 3 lessons of any one of our Premium Membership (PM) courses (choose whatever feels most timely to you now), then
3. Relish in how the membership is worth your investment.

And with that goodly message resounding in your head –

I now declare this parenthesis over.)

Good.

The idea for this email was sparked by the opening to a YA novel that was on Townhouse this last week.

The central image was kind of amazing.

An end of season fairground. A cold day, heading into sunset. A Ferris wheel not turning because of a broken gondola.

And – a boy sent up to climb the wheel, to fix the broken gondola strut.

And – that boy, walking in cheap trainers on the loft of that wheel, for a moment silhouetted against that sunsetting London sky.

Good, huh? I mean, that image is so striking, you could remember it for a long time. It would be hard to put that book down in a bookstore. It’s hard not to think of the boy, on that wheel, with his mallet for thumping gondola struts.

But (to my mind and other people may differ), that scene wasn’t quite flowing right. Now, to be fair, that’s pretty standard and is to be expected. The whole point of Townhouse is to present work that isn’t ready in order to get it ready.

And two points struck me in particular. The first is that we, as writers, have very long to do lists, especially when we’re less experienced, and especially when we’re opening a novel.

So, just from the top of my head, we have to:

• Establish location
• Establish character
• Get some kind of story questions moving
• Including (probably) a little bit of razzle-dazzle to convince the prospective reader that they have to stick around.
• Write decently
• Paint quick descriptions of any other characters who are kicking around. (The scene in question had two.)
• Deliver atmosphere
• Avoid sloppy language
• Delete redundant language
• Offer some kind of thematic resonance
• And so on.

That’s a lot. And I think that, often and not just with opening pages, writers are so busy trying to deliver This, That and the Other, that they lose sight of the little bit of magic that brought them to this scene in the first place.

And – we have a boy walking the arch of a Ferris wheel against a crimson London sky.

And – that boy is feeling the air move and considering the slipperiness of the wet metal beneath his trainers as he walks that curve.

That’s the magic. Everything else has to bend to that.

So, for example, we do need to know about the colour of the skyline, because that’s part of the drama. We don’t need to know where the fairground will fold itself away for winter.

We do need to know about the fair-owner yelling up at the kid, because he’s clearly part of the scene, but he should be pushed away and (for now) be made secondary. And so on.

Find the magic and prioritise it.

Not just with openings, but everywhere. What’s the magic? Is it central to the scene? If not, make it central.

And on this particular occasion, there was a further difficulty. We have two images and they’re both amazing:

• A boy on a Ferris wheel, silhouetted against a crimson London sky
• That boy feeling what it’s like to be forty feet off the ground and with the evening air moving around him.

But the first of those images is a distance shot. We’re a long way from the boy’s inner thoughts. The second of those images is the exact opposite: it’s all about the boy’s inner thoughts. The two camera angles are basically incompatible, and we want them both.

The solution here is about starting distance and moving steadily in. From silhouette view, to some closer-range view. (e.g.: “The boy had a rucksack of tools, on his shoulder, but he wore it lightly, as though unconcerned.”) Here, we start to move from general silhouette, to closer-up detail, but still nothing about the boy’s inner world. Then you’d shift to something closer still. (“He wore cheap trainers, one dirty white lace was already starting to come undone.”) Then you can reveal something of his inner world, and then, if you want, the boy can actually take over the narrative himself. (“It was high, and it was dangerous, but it was beautiful and it was lovely.” – that’s now the boy thinking, not the narrator speaking.)

So that’s basically the secret. Move from out to in, but do it gradually, so the shock doesn’t seem abrupt.

If you want one other tip, then give proper time and space to your touch of magic. You don’t need to rush away. Your reader won’t want you to.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Scene

This week, I want a scene where you have a lovely image or moment that you want to make central and memorable.

What I want is:

• Title, genre, a line or two of context.
• The magic: a line or two explaining where you think the magic lies in this scene
• The scene itself: our usual 250 or so words.

You get extra points if the little bit of magic coheres nicely with your themes and elevator pitch. When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Got that? You got it, I know you do.

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 eight – two thirds of the way through the 12-month course – and we are talking endings.  

Real life rarely gives nice, neat, ‘everything now makes sense’ endings. I think of moments in my life that, in hindsight were endings: the slice of pie my father saved for tomorrow, believing he had a tomorrow. The last time I carried my son on my hip, or the last time my daughter was happy to hold hands in public.  

Endings are important in stories, and I have a theory as to why: our own mortality, the inevitable ending we all face, is a major reason the artistic endeavour of novels exists. In short, we read novels to practise dying.  

A novel demands we invest in the illusion of a life – a life we go on to learn the rhythm of. We become familiar with its timescales and habits; with the loves, regrets and transformations its characters undergo. And then we’re asked to face the ending of these. We turn the last page and find we have to leave. Novels are rehearsals for mortality – a way to practise the art of letting go. Furthermore, the novel (though I’m happy to include poetry in my thesis) is the only art form that does this. Great paintings, transcendent symphonies? These imply, but a novel enacts. 

A painting or a song is experienced in the immediacy of the present — it’s capable of evoking eternity or the sublime, certainly — but it cannot carry us through a life lived in time. Whereas a novel unfolds like consciousness. It moves us through sequence, choice and consequence, memory and application. It requires duration, mirroring the shape of a human life. It delves into the interiors of others: we become mind-readers when we are novel-readers. When a novel ends, it doesn’t just stop, it dies – and as readers, we feel that loss. How many of us approach the ending of a great story with dread, not wanting to let the characters go? Isn’t part of a great ending, from a skilful author, that bittersweet realisation that you’re never going to hear that character say another thing? You’re never going to experience any more of their possibilities. These endings echo our own.  

In most great novels, the ending doesn’t just provide narrative closure. It asks questions: where and what is the meaning of the story? Has it done enough? What regrets remain, and why? Is there redemption available, or merely resigned comprehension and deflated acceptance? These are life’s big, keep-you-awake-at-three-in-the-morning questions. Music and paintings gesture towards these, but only fiction makes us experience them. 

But there is a paradox, too – as the novel dies, as the people inside it vanish, there are also beginnings. Something of a book’s characters can remain with us. We get to consider what happened and imagine their next steps. Perhaps we will discuss them with friends and, through those conversations, test out our own life narratives and soul yearnings? We may even – those of us writing a series – get to write up what comes next. The metaphysics of the novel intrinsically binds beginnings within endings. 

Which is maybe why, in this month of learning all about how to craft a brilliant ending, I actually find myself turning towards the beginning of my manuscript.  

As I have been writing my way towards the end of my first draft, I’ve been experiencing more and more of a ‘stop’. The words I could conjure were brief; sketchy. Writing began to make me feel a bit burned. I was charred wood, and the story wasn’t getting inside of me anymore. It was because the narrative ending of the story needed more supporting structure at the beginning.  

So – as in life, as in novels, endings have beginnings. By working through my Ultimate Novel Writing Programme course materials and discussing the detail with my tutor and peers, I’m better able to understand the significance of my book’s ending – and see how the structure of the beginning affects it. Heading back to the start of my novel has made the ending feel more alive. I can positively feel it inflating. 

Endings are powerful, and we writers bear a weighty responsibility for them. If you agree with my theory, we’re purveyors of rehearsed mortality – which might be the most human act of all. If you’re anything like me, you might want to get some help and assistance with shouldering that responsibility. For that support, I can highly recommend the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme! 

The Ultimate Novel Writing Programme (and its little sister, the Novel Writing Course) run twice a year. Our most intensive tutored courses, they offer writers more personalised, one-to-one support than is available through any other online writing course. To find out more about either, or to apply to be part of our next cohort, visit the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme or the Novel Writing Course web page. You can also contact us at any time to chat about your writing journey and explore which, if any, of our courses or services could help you. We love to chat with authors, and we will never sell you a service that we don’t think is the best fit for you – so don’t be shy!

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.

I’ve been a working novelist a long time. My first book came out in my twenties – a long time ago now – and my last four were published by Penguin Random House. I thought I knew the business: how novels work, how publishing works, how to hook readers. But becoming a mentor was a surprise. I’ve mentored writers of all ages and backgrounds, from the US to the UK to Australia, and six lessons have come up again and again. To my surprise, mentoring has taught me – or reminded me – so much about being a novelist. 

1. No One Is Born a Novelist 

We often talk about people having innate talent, and there’s something to that, but no one is born knowing what it means to be a working novelist. You have to learn two things: how to construct your novel, and what a reader, including agents and editors, will want from it. No one is born a novelist. There are things you can learn, and people who can teach you. 

2. Know Your Market (and Respect It!) 

One thing I say most to new novelists: know your market. Understanding where your book belongs is the smartest strategy. Think like agents and editors think. Research what’s being published in your genre and read hit novels in that area. You’d be amazed how many writers don’t really know their market. Seeing how empowering it is to understand that has made me rethink my own. 

3. The Opening Chapter Is Everything 

I’ll confess something. I didn’t realise how important your opening chapter is until I became a mentor. I knew in theory, but now I see it. (Not least because I also do Jericho’s Agent Submission Pack Reviews, and you really notice it there.) Your first chapter is your big chance. Agents decide within a page or two whether to keep reading – and so will readers. That opening must show who your protagonist is and what kind of world they inhabit, just as it’s about to fall apart. Make sure your opening sizzles. 

4. No, Wait! Character Is Everything 

When talking about novels, we often focus on plot, but it’s great, clear characters that make novels sing. Not their name or hair colour or funny brooch, but who they are deep down. What do they want? What will they learn they wanted all along but didn’t know? And how do you make the reader their confidante? Every novelist needs to get their book to where the character’s desires and needs are central to the reading experience. 

5. Learn to Hear the Music of Your Novel 

Many mentees bring work that feels uneven, and I’ve realised how much novel-writing is about rhythm. A novel is like a symphony: harmonies, instruments, crescendos. Every scene contributes to the whole. You don’t hear it on day one; you find it through writing. This has brought me back to my own work: you can hear the music of your novel – and you must.

6. We All Need Feedback 

I’m in a writing group with other novelists, and I still rely on their feedback. (In fact, I just took my next novel to them.) If you have an honest friend, that might be enough, but often you need a professional ally who will tell you the truth, kindly but clearly. That’s what a mentor does. It’s not just advice; it’s someone on your side in the hardest stage of a novelist’s life: before success. Writing is full of feedback – from agents, editors, reviewers – but it’s at the beginning that it matters most. And here I am, years into a career, still wanting it. Novel-writing begins as a learning process but remains one, and that’s the joy of a long-term career. You never stop learning – or wanting to get better. Put that in your heart, and you won’t go wrong. 

Work one-on-one with Neil Blackmore or any of our expert writing mentors & book coaches. Our mentoring service is like a choose-your-own-adventure for writers. Pick a package that fits your needs, and use your hours however you like. Each package includes your mentor’s reading, editing, and any calls or video chats. Find out more.

In an excellent email earlier this week, and in her full blog post here, my colleague Laura Starkey wrote about what our team is actually looking for when we read your first 500 words for our current competition. (Competition details here – but don’t wait around, entries close at the end of the weekend. Oh, and don't forget you've got until Monday to join us as a Premium Member for 30% off. More on that below...)

To summarise, our readers all highlighted slightly different aspects of what they were after:

Verity: “I’m looking for a character I’m going to want to stay with for the whole story – and they don’t have to be a good person! Show me something of who they are.”

Tanya: “I love it when a character shows a bit of vulnerability or their slightly messy, less likeable side.”

Becca: “It’s essential that your reader roughly understands who they’re following and what’s going on.”

Kate: “I want to feel what the character is feeling, while still getting a sense of the plot.”

Imogen: “A clear sense of genre is crucial.”

Jonny: “I’m already assuming the sea is stormy, the rain is heavy ... I want to dive straight into the action.”

Kat: “I’m looking for a truly original concept brought to life with exceptional writing.”

Rachel: “I’m looking for ‘sweets’, something intriguing and slightly unexplained.”

Laura: “I need to feel like I’m in a safe pair of hands – that whatever questions an opening provokes are going to be answered, and in an interesting way.”

That sounds like a slightly overwhelming list, but I think it’s doable and doable without the need for huge fireworks. Here’s one of my openings. I think, as it happens, I have a yen for pretty tedious openings, which doesn’t sound like a generally fantastic idea, I know.

Here’s the start of the third of my Fiona books – an opening that revels in its own boringness:

I like the police force. I like its rules, its structures. I like the fact that, most of the time, we are on the side of ordinary people. Sorting out their road accidents and petty thefts. Preventing violence, keeping order. In the words of our bland but truthful corporate slogan, we’re Keeping South Wales Safe. That’s a task worth doing and one I enjoy. Only, Gott im Himmel, the job can be tedious.

Right now, I’m sitting in a cramped little office above the stockroom at a furniture superstore on the Newport Road. I’m here with a DS, Huw Bowen, recently transferred from Swansea. A finance guy from Swindon is shoving spreadsheets at me and looking at me with pained, watery eyes. We have been here forty minutes.

Bowen takes the topmost spreadsheet and runs a thick finger across it. It comprises a column of names, a row of months, a block of numbers.

‘So these are the payments?’ says Bowen.

‘Correct.’

The finance guy from Swindon wears a plastic security pass clipped to his jacket pocket. Kevin Tildesley.

‘So all these people have been paid all these amounts?’

‘Correct.’

Tax deducted, national insurance, everything?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

The only window in the office looks out over the shop floor itself. We’re up on the top storey, so we’re on a level with the fluorescent lighting and what seems like miles of silver ducting. The superstore version of heaven.

Bowen still hasn’t got it. He’s a nice guy, but he’s as good with numbers as I am at singing opera.

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. I’m theoretically here to take notes, but my pad is mostly blank.

‘And these are all employees? Contracts in place? Bank accounts in order? Anything else, I don’t know … pension plans and all that?’

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

Bowen stares at him.

His mouth says nothing. His eyes say, ‘So why. The fuck. Were you paying them?’

That’s just shy of 400 words, so in the competition I’d get to have another 100 words involving manila folders and payroll audits and the like. Just to be clear: this opening would never win a competition. That doesn’t mean it’s the wrong opening for the book – I don’t think it is. Just that the Competition Opening genre demands a bit more tarantaraa than this one offers, and some books don’t want to do their tarantaraa upfront.

Character

That said, I think that the opening broadly ticks the boxes that wanted ticking. So on character, we said:

Verity: “I’m looking for a character I’m going to want to stay with for the whole story – and they don’t have to be a good person! Show me something of who they are.”

Tanya: “I love it when a character shows a bit of vulnerability or their slightly messy, less likeable side.”

Kate: “I want to feel what the character is feeling.”

We start off with a fairly general paragraph about the police: roughly, “Yes, I like the police, but it can be very dull.” That’s OK by way of character intro, except that you might find at least 50% of coppers saying something similar – perhaps without the Gott im Himmel, perhaps without the "bland but truthful". But still, this paragraph isn’t one to clinch anything.

250 words in, however, and we get this:

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. I’m theoretically here to take notes, but my pad is mostly blank.

That “little blue ledge” is unique to Fiona. The fact that she injures herself to cope with the tedium. That way of phrasing it. Tanya wanted something “slightly messy” – and boof! This character’s mess involves totally pointless self-harm on the very first page. We know the character’s feelings immediately and we already know they’re going to be an interesting one to watch.

Story

In relation to story, we also said:

Kate: “I want to … [get] a sense of the plot.”

Imogen: “A clear sense of genre is crucial.”

Jonny: “I want to dive straight into the action.”

And? 

Well, the clinching bit here is the last bit of dialogue:

[Bowen’s] mouth says nothing. His eyes say, ‘So why. The fuck. Were you paying them?’

And that’s the book, right? – or at least the first part of the book. An ordinary furniture shop in a Cardiff retail park has been scammed into paying out £38,000 to two non-existent employees. That’s hardly a corpse on page 1 – it’s a tedious fraud on page 3 – but we have action (kinda), we have genre, and we have the first indication as to what story lies ahead.

And of course, you can rely on readers here. Absolutely no one is going to think, “My word, this is going to be a boring novel. Our hero-detective is going to spend 400 pages analysing spreadsheets until she finds the white-collar culprit behind this minor scam.”

On the contrary, they think, “Uh-oh, this is going to lead to some kind of murder and there’s going to be some much bigger crime here and Fiona’s going to get in over her head and there will be Shenanigans. She’ll probably explode something or sink something or throw someone over a cliff.” They think that because they can read the promise of the cover, and the blurb and their knowledge of what a crime novel is. That’s why most of my books don’t actually start with a corpse discovery. They don’t have to. Readers know what’s coming up and they love the tease. A sense of the plot (Kate’s phrase) is more important than an opening that has bullets flying. (Which is also perfectly fine, but optional.)

Sweets and safety

Our readers also demanded:

Kat: “I’m looking for a truly original concept brought to life with exceptional writing.”

Rachel: “I’m looking for ‘sweets’, something intriguing and slightly unexplained.”

Laura: “I need to feel like I’m in a safe pair of hands.”

And honestly? I don’t think I’ve delivered for Kat. There is, I think, a properly good idea underlying this book, but it doesn’t show its hand in that opening 500 words. That’s why the First 500 is a bit of an art form in itself. It is a good way to find the best opening; not necessarily a good way to find the best book.

But the Rachel / Laura ideas here are interesting – safe pair of hands + a couple of sweeties. I especially like that idea of sweets: Raymond Chandler used to type his novels on fairly small bits of paper and he demanded of himself that each page contained one little spill of magic. It’s a good discipline.

In my view, the magic offered can be relatively low key. That ‘little blue ledge of pain’ counts. I think the final line or two (“Why … were you paying them?”) offers just the right amount of bite for this stage of the story. The ‘pained watery eyes’ – well, that’s not quite a spill of magic, but it tells us quite a lot about who we’re with and what we’re doing. We know without being directly told that poor old Kevin Tildesley is not very masculine. He’s a man of spreadsheets and watery eyes and plastic badges. Bowen is a man of thick fingers, sweary eyes and limited comprehension.

We also understand Fiona’s predicament: she’s understood the numbers (which Bowen hasn’t) and she’s a woman of action who’s not afraid of the fraud (unlike Tildesley, who is.) And she’s been there for 40 minutes. And this is a cramped little office shoved into the roof of a furniture store.

Most of all, when I reread all this, I think: “Yes, I’m confident in this author. I can tell – from those character details, some word choices, the dialogue – that this author has confidence in the story they’re about to tell. In fact, they’re confident enough to start with an overtly boring opening: one that talks quite a lot about how unexciting this all is.”

And for me – when I’m choosing a book to read, not when I’m judging a first 500 competition – I look for two things.

Confidence is the first. Anything to tell me that I can trust this author with the next few hours of my time.

Clarity, or something like it, is the second. I want an author who is going to make it easy for me to immerse myself in his or her world. I want that the author to serve me and my needs. I don’t want to read a book where I’m meant to be admiring someone else’s wonderful art. (I mean: I’m happy to admire great writers. But I’ll only admire them if they reward my reading.)

An opening is a joyful thing. It’s a table full of objects, concealed by a black velvet cloth. The author catches the reader’s eye, winks, and removes the first of those objects… or perhaps only reveals an edge, or some dimly lit surface. The game is fun, because what else lies beneath the cloth? That first glimpse is a clue – a tease – but we are still far from whisking away the whole cloth.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Openings

OK: bit of a weird one this. We’ve been talking about openings, so I’m going to ask you for an opening. But I don’t want to tread on any first 500 toes.

250 words or so. Let me have it. When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

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

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

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

Character and point of view

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

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

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

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

Genre and orientation

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

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

Action, originality and intrigue

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

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

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

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

So –

I was about to hold forth on Purpose –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But –

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

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

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

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

Phew. Done. Ready.

So: Purpose.

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

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

But the book. Your story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what does all this mean for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget the cat

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

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

It feels so glued on, so inauthentic.

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

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

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Purpose

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

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

Til soon.

Harry

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

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

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

Mike Murray, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

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

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

Go enter!"

Kelly Jackson, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

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

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

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

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

Richard Martin, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

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

Michelle Sanchez, 2024 Jericho Writers First 500 Finalist

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

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

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

I said last week that:

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

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

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

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

Well, let’s take a look.

Establishing trust

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

Gantry

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

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

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

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

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

Establishing character-in-setting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue water to port and starboard.

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

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

Or this:

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

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

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

Ramping up the atmosphere

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

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

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

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

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

A grand peedie tirl, indeed.

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

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

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

Climax

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

The sea is all but impossible now.

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

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

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

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

And then:

I go downstairs.

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

Anyway. I take the bucket.

Go down to the engine room.

Engine. Auxiliary engine.

Pumps. Boiler. Cooling system. Whatever.

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

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

Go over to the auxiliary engine.

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

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

I wish I knew more about engines.

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

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

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

Summing up?

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

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

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your research

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

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

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

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

Til soon.

Harry

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

The questions I ask are things like this:

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

And so on.

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

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

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

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

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

And yes. Kind of. But mostly no.

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s a constraint, a fierce one.

Next, novelty.

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

That’s another fiercely hard constraint to meet.

And then, coherence.

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

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

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

And you?

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

And …

Help is 30% cheaper in November

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

So: join us. We’d be thrilled.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Ingredients mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

Til soon.

Harry

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

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

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

1. Starting in the wrong place

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

2. Scenes lack narrative drive

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

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

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

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

Lots of people will say nice things to you

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

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

You can win free stuff

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

You have an inbuilt deadline

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

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

You have an achievement to add to your writer bio

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

You’ll have a compelling opening to your novel

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

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

Enter the competition

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

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

Oh my golly and oh my gosh, there are many ways to build a book.

The purpose of our Build Your Book Month hasn’t really been to guide you in The One True Path. Plotting isn’t like that. There are plenty of variant approaches and they all work. That is: they all work for some authors and some types of book. You just need to find the approach that fits you.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that any single approach has all the answers:

• The Three Act Structure: I don’t think this even describes screenwriting structures all that reliably. I don’t think that it even describes the films – like Chinatown – that supposedly act as exemplars of how the system works.
• The Hero’s Journey. Works fine for some stories – Star Wars is the obvious one – but it’s plainly a stupid structure for something like a detective novel. I’d say this structure feels niche rather than central.
• The Rise of the Twist. Thrillers these days brand themselves as twisty in the same way as chick list used to cover itself in squirly pastel fonts. But can you write a decent thriller without its being particularly twisty? Yes, of course, you can. Twist if you want to. Don’t if you don’t.
• Snowflakery. This is a good solid approach, where you start with a very brief – 1 sentence summary of your plot – and then expand and expand from there. That’s a tool so loose that it can’t really go wrong … except that the original snowflake method was vastly more prescriptive about just how that process of expansion should take place.

So what do I think really matters? What do I do?

Well, I do think that you need a basic concept that works. I call this an elevator pitch: not some pretty slogan to put on Twitter or the front of a book, but the basic DNA of your story. “Girl + romance + werewolf” – that’ll do.

I’ve talked about this plenty before. The first lesson of our Good To Great course talks about the concept in detail. You already have access if you’re a Premium Member, but if you’re not you can still get the lesson as a free taster session here. If you’re not feeling really solid about that elevator pitch idea and why it’s so central to everything you do thereafter, then you should take 40 minutes to work through that lesson. There are lots of writery things you can skip, but don’t skip that.

After that, I do think that you need to understand your central character(s). What are they about? Who are they?

It’s hard to explain the kind of knowledge that you need there. It’s easy to develop the kind of character-narratives that give you a hero like Mission Impossible’s Ethan Hunt. Yes, there’s backstory. Yes, there are details briskly suggestive of personality. But really? Ethan Hunt feels like a blank into which you can conveniently pop the biggest movie star of his generation.

A good character is not a convenient blank. The best characters never are. One of the reasons why Friends was such a success was that it never, ever, ever, ever deflected from character. Maybe there was a good punchline to be had, a great joke to be made … but if that joke required that Joey was astute, or Monica was relaxed, or Phoebe was a corporate drone, the screenwriters would never take the joke. The character shape was iron. The show worked everything out from there.

And then I think you need a shape.

You need to be able to see a story arc in its broadest terms.

The clearest example I can offer there has to do with the Deepest Grave. I knew I wanted to write about fake antiquities and a hunt (in modern Britain) for Arthurian relics. I had confidence in an elevator pitch which was basically:

Murder story + antiquity fraud + Arthurian relics.

The initiating murder was easy enough: I chose to behead an archaeologist, but any number of routes would have been fine.

The underlying crime was easy enough to construct as well. My baddies needed to create a credible Arthurian relic with enough clues suggesting an authentic provenance so that when they “found” and stole the relic, it would be considered authentic enough to be extremely valuable. Again: plenty of ways to do all that.

But all that felt a big girl-meets-boy in terms of story structure. There was a necessary complication missing. So with girl-meets-boy, we’re waiting for, “And boy is a vampire!”. Or, “And boy is dying!” Or, “But one is a Montagu and the other is a Capulet!”

In effect, that complication takes a standard story structure and throws it in a new and unexpected direction.

What was my complication? I didn’t have it. I couldn’t start writing the book until I did.

And then – bingo. My complication was, “Fiona makes a fake Arthurian relic of her own.” That made perfect plot sense. (She could draw the baddies to her, as they’d have to take her relic off the market before they could sell their own.) But better than that, it added the perfect ingredient thematically: if the novel was about fakery, then faking a fake was perfect. And this is Fiona! She’s not a character who wants to approach things normal police-style ever. So faking a relic was the perfect (utterly unanticipated but totally logical) step to take.

It also gave the whole novel that sense of a fold – a mid-book inversion of everything the reader expected.

Because this is a crime novel, I don’t have to think very long or hard about my denouement. My books open with a crime and they end with a solution … after a pretty serious crisis of some kind, naturally.

And that’s it. That’s all that I need before I start writing. A pitch. A character. A sense of the basic shape of the story, together with some mid-book complication. All that and a (for me, nice and easy) denouement.

If I have those things, I know that the book I’m writing will be basically marketable. That is: if I don’t mess up the execution, I’ll have a novel that people want to read (good pitch) and will satisfy once read (shape, complication, denouement.)

I’m not saying that this is the way YOU have to proceed. Our final Build Your Book Month session was delivered on Wednesday by my colleague (and bestselling author), Becca Day. She gave a really useful range of plotting approaches: a kind of sushi conveyor, where you pick off the tools that work best for you.

But, if you want to know my choices from that sushi belt? Well, it’s loose plotting, in Becca’s scheme. Tight enough to be marketable. Loose enough to be free.

For those of you who stuck with us through Build Your Book Month: I hope you loved it, and I hope your writing flourished as a result. For those who didn’t – well, you can always catch up on the replay.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Present your outline

Post your book outline into this forum on Townhouse – whatever you have and whatever approach you take. (Remember to log in first!)

As always, give feedback on other people’s outlines, thinking especially about:

• Conflict
• Stakes
• Pacing
• Character growth
• Whether you see a clear complication in the story plan.

If you don’t have an outline, share your basic premise and the method you’ll be using (even if that method is pretty much making it up as you go along).

Til soon.

Harry

As you know, this week, as with the past three weeks, we are trit-trotting in step with the FEAST of FABULOUSNESS that is our Build Your Book Month.

And I wanted to pick up on something that my colleague (and fellow author) Laura Starkey said yesterday:

A story isn’t about what happens; it’s about how what happens changes the people in the story.

Now that feels like a worthy truth. Elizabeth Bennett is a quick-witted, high-spirited and confident lass. But she’s also young. She’s a bit naïve. She’s a bit quick to make judgements and over-confident in the judgements she makes. Stuff happens (Darcy! Wickham! Dreadful vicars! Stupid sisters and elopements!) And – she grows up. She matures. She gets her man.

Yes, on the one hand the story has to do with who hitches with whom, but the reason why that particular story did so well is that we felt the characters change – Lizzy changes (and matures), but so does Darcy. So does her dad. Wickham doesn’t change, but that’s his moral failure, the reason why he can’t exit the novel a winner.

And, OK, Jane Austen is widely thought to be Quite A Good Writer, but countless other authors play by the same rules. Bridget Jones’s Diary uses the same basic story … and Bridget matures. So does her version of Darcy. (But not the can’t-change Hugh Grant.)

You can’t really find a decent romance, or even a half-decent one, where Laura’s Rule doesn’t apply.

And it’s not just romances. It’s true of plenty of spy novels (think Spy Who Came In From The Cold). It’s true of literary novels (think Handmaid’s Tale.) It’s true of plenty of kids’ books and fantasy novels and, in fact, most novels you ever pick up.

But …

Well, I think Laura’s Rule isn’t universal, or at least not quite.

In big geo-political thrillers, it seems slightly flippant to care about whether Jack Ryan does or doesn’t change. Surely what’s important is, ‘Does the world get blown to bits, yes or no?’ I mean, it’s likely that Jack Ryan has some feelings about that. He’s generally an ‘ideally, don’t destroy the world’ kind of guy. But his feelings are surely very secondary, even to the reader.

Then there are book series to consider.

Most romances don’t beget sequels. Happy Ever After endings are slightly let down by an ongoing series. (No one wants “Lizzy Bennet: the Divorce” or “Lizzy Bennet and the Raunchy Footman”.)

But crime novels often, often, often have sequels. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe, Jack Reacher. These books have a basically stable central character. The stories are about those people doing what is effectively their day job. You don’t expect Holmes or Marple or Reacher to end the novel much changed by what’s happened. On the contrary: you expect them to do the exact same things in the next book and the next and the next.

But Laura’s Rule contains a basic truth and it’s one that can be weirdly overlooked.

Here’s an extract from Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell – a much-praised kids’ book:

The kraken [a sea monster] gave a shriek of rage like a cat on fire. Then it seized the boat, and the entire structure was flung up into the air, cracking and splintering as it landed again on the waves. Ratwin was hurled into the water; Mal and Christopher were thrown sideways, to left and right. He hit the cabin wall, and she struck her head as she landed on the deck, and lay unconscious.

The kraken twisted its great head to look: for one beat, it hung there in the water, blinking its huge grey eyes. And then the kraken reached out, and plucked Mal bodily from the boat. Nighthand lunged after her, knife in hand.

‘No!’ he roared.

‘Mal!’, Christopher yelled.

The kraken laid her on a piece of driftwood, as carefully as a child laying down a doll. And then, before Christopher could understand what had happened, its ten tentacles fired towards them and the whole boat was crushed and pulled beneath the surface. The suction dragged Christopher down into black whirling chaos.

For what felt like minutes he spun, over and over in the churning sea. He fought, his lungs shrieking back to the surface. A piece of wood, part of a table rocked on the waves; he hauled himself on to it. There was sea-foam everywhere, he could see nothing; but there, suddenly, was Mal. As he watched the driftwood bucked and she slipped from it eyes were closed, and she was falling.

So in fewer than 250 words, we have a boat being destroyed, a girl (Mal) being seized by the kraken, an attempted rescue (by Nighthand), some weird thing with Mal being laid down on some floating driftwood, the whole boat and Christopher being pulled down onto the depths, a fight back up to the surface, climbing onto a tabletop – then seeing Mal, but losing her again.

That’s a LOT of action (and, surprisingly, no fewer than three semi-colons. My entire Fiona Griffiths series contains one semi-colon, and that came via a quotation from Wikipedia.)

But is that action more exciting or confusing?

To me, it’s basically confusing.

In part, that’s because so much happens so damn fast. For example, a big burly warrior (Nighthand) charges after the kraken with a knife. Well? What happens? We have no idea. Does Nighthand make contact? Did he inflict any damage? Does the kraken even notice? Is Nighthand dead? Lost underwater? We have no idea. The questions aren’t even addressed.

But also, there’s not a moment’s pause for emotional reaction.

Some little bits we can surmise.

So when Nighthand roars, ‘No!’ and charges around with a knife, we can tell he’s upset at the kraken taking Mal. The same goes for Christopher’s exclamation.

But then the kraken destroys the boat completely. What’s Christopher’s reaction? We don’t know. How does he feel about this? We don’t know.

He’s then sucked down into the abyss. We know his lungs shriek. (Duh, he’s underwater, course they do.) But we don’t know what he’s thinking or feeling. Is he thinking, ‘Oh crap, this is it.’ Or, ‘I must swim upwards and find Mal.’ Or, ‘I wonder what’s for supper?’ We have no idea, except that the last possibility seems improbable given the circs.

And then he gets to the surface (no moment of phew!), and clambers onto something floating (no moment of double-phew!), and then he sees Mal, apparently in one piece (no triple, super-big phew!) – and then she’s gone again.

What does all this tell us? Well, it doesn’t tell us that Katherine R is a bad writer – she isn’t – just that this passage needed a more switched-on editor.

But it does tell us that action is only explicable via emotion. Without the ‘reaction shots’ to guide us, it’s hard to know what we should be feeling when. And even a vast amount of on-page drama can feel flat without constant emotional reflection.

Laura’s Rule, remember, says:

A story is about how what happens changes the people in the story.

And the trouble with this Rundell passage is that the people didn’t seem changed, even as all that chaos was happening around them. We saw and felt no emotional impact, with the result that the scene, which should have been amazing, felt flat.

So in my Fiona books, I don’t expect Fiona to be hugely changed overall by the events of the story. She’s a series character, so she moves from one book to the next largely the same, except for some general growing up, getting more senior, acquiring and losing boyfriends and so on.

But as things happen, she reacts. “A kraken has destroyed my boat: I feel scared.” “I’ve swum to the surface and found a tabletop: oh good, I feel relieved.” That sort of thing, but without the krakens.

All this also means that as you plot the events of your book, you’re effectively plotting an emotional sequence at the same time. The two things need to work in parallel, always.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Action & Reaction

Nice easy one today.

Find a kraken in your story. Have it pull a boat underwater. Show your characters’ reactions.

If you lack a kraken, or your kraken has a crack in, find any other action moment in your story and give us that, 250 words or so please. We’re focusing less on the action itself and more on how it feels to the characters experiencing it. When you're ready post in Townhouse.

Got that? Then get crackin’.

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 seven – ooh, my lucky number – and it’s all about voice and style.  

Oh no. Groan.  

Come on, admit it. You rolled your eyes a little bit too, didn’t you? It can’t just be me. But why the big sigh? Well, because this is nebulous stuff. Knowing what voice and style means when it comes to deciding what goes on the page – being clear enough to actively control it, with deliberate choices, avoiding my foibles and leaning into my strengths – all of that is hard. 

This said, however, we all know a good writing voice when we read it. Pretty much every literary agent will, at some point, talk about the ‘fresh voice’, or wax lyrical about how the voice was ‘so clear, so identifiable, so unique’ it bagged whichever author it belonged to an automatic yes. From what I can see, ‘voice’ is what drives a lot of publishing deals – so I need to get better at understanding what mine is. I daresay a lot of us do. 

But how to identify voice? At first it all seems so diaphanous, like harvesting fog. But it is possible. It is! All things artistic and creative have technique underpinning them. There’s work you can do. Practical ways to get better at producing great voice and style.  

Look, this is how I like to think about it – finding your writing ‘voice’ is just like falling in love. 

When you were younger, did you ever ask a grown-up in your life about love? How would you know when you’d fallen in love? Whether they were the right person? Did you listen to love songs, watch romantic films and wonder – is that love? Did you search for it in books, too? And what answer did that grown-up whose wisdom you sought give you? I bet it was something along the lines of “You’ll just know it when you find it.” 

And then one day you actually do fall in love – and yes, it feels wonderful and vivid and alive, just how all the Hollywood directors painted it. But it also feels messy and difficult and sometimes like really, really, hard work. Which is weird, you know, because does that mean you are doing ‘love’ wrong? Isn’t it all supposed to feel easy and magical?  

Well, writing to my own voice and style feels a lot like that too: a big leap of faith and a lot of graft, most of the time.  

But underneath the “you’ll just know,” is the practical reality that love is created by small practices, daily habits and many, many choices. There’s some research* which shows clear correlation between a couple’s ability to react to requests for attention and the quality and longevity of their relationship. Which means that if my loved-one points out a pretty bird on the fence post and I immediately stop, look and take notice of their delight and join in with them, I’m performing a loving act and therefore creating more love. 

The author’s voice little bird equivalents are ‘vocabulary’, ‘sentence structure’, ‘tone’, ‘point of view’ and ‘syntax’ (to name the main ones). Complicated little birds, sure. But still knowable, still definable. 

My tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme has been encouraging me to notice these ‘birds’. Not just to nod vaguely when they turn up, but to pay close, close attention to them. The course is encouraging me to become an active loving, soulmate to my writing. Out of this will come a clear, confident authorial voice and style.  

Learning to show up for myself more and more – to write aloud the inner whirrings of my heart, to reproduce them as accurately as I can, without too much social conditioning or negative judgment getting in the way – helps me inhabit myself more fully, so my writing becomes a little more powerfully me each time. 

This has been the hardest blog to write for the simple reason that voice is such a personal thing. My pursuit of developing ‘voice’ takes me deep inside, to personal corners that my ego fears ought not to be mined. But then, why else go to the whole bother of writing a novel? What else is this act of weaving a great arc of story about, if not to put my feelings, perspectives, and questions into it? Whose novel is it if it is not fully rendered in the author’s voice?  

It’s hard writing a novel, any way one looks at it, but I reckon it’s harder if you’re trying to be someone other than who you are whilst doing it. You’re going to need lots of help along the way – maybe even a tutored course or two. In the meantime, I hope these words suffice, little birds that they are. 

Until next time… 

*The "bird test" comes from the Gottman Institute's research on "bids for connection," where one partner makes a small request to connect, and the other partner responds by "turning toward" them. 

The Ultimate Novel Writing Programme (and its little sister, the Novel Writing Course) run twice a year. Our most intensive tutored courses, they offer writers more personalised, one-to-one support than is available through any other online writing course. To find out more about either, or to apply to be part of our next cohort, visit the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme or the Novel Writing Course web page. You can also contact us at any time to chat about your writing journey and explore which, if any, of our courses or services could help you. We love to chat with authors, and we will never sell you a service that we don't think is the best fit for you - so don't be shy!

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.

This month, as you know, we’re Build-A-Booking: considering everything to do with plot and aiming to get our novel outlines in p-p-perfect shape before November.

And? For a lot of writers, there’s a log that lies across the path to a perfect plot. The name of that log is World Building.

Now yes, a large proportion of you will be thinking, “Ah,hey ho, this email doesn’t apply to me, because my book is perfectly grounded in the Real World. My dragon count is zero. There are no badass fairies having raunchy sex with were-creatures. I also have no star-fleets in battle, no wormholes in space, no complicated explanations about the gaseous mix in my atmosphere.”

But we all have to world build.

Yes, your world may operate according to normal rules of physics and technology, but you may still need to explain to the reader:

• Your character’s world of work: a hospital, a spy agency, a marketing firm, a special forces unit
• Your character’s key relationships: mother, father, brother, sister, kids, best friends
• Important bits of backstory, not just for your main character but for (say) a best friend, who will end up betraying your character in Chapter xx because of the thing that happened when she and your character were both at university.
• The central setting for your book. Even if that’s somewhere as recognisable as Manhattan, there’ll still be a lot to explain if your book involves chases through the subway system, the currency trading system on Wall Street, or how an escort agency operates from the inside.

And all authors have a tendency to think like this:

“Well, gosh, I do need to explain the intricacies of the subway system and Rosa’s betrayal in Chapter xx is going to make no sense unless I reveal the Affair of the Stolen Clock in her university days, so what I’ll do is just set my story down for a moment, while I do my spadework on those important topics. Then, when we get going again, Readers Will Rejoice, because my subway chase is cool and Rosa’s betrayal will be surprising but also kinda logical at the same time.”

So the story gets set down for a page or four. Yet, strange to say, when the author picks it up again, it’s holding many fewer readers than it was before.

That’s the World-Building Paradox, my friend. Readers buy your book because of the cool new world you offer them. They want to know about the rules of that new world (magic, or spaceships, or just subway tunnels & stolen clocks.) But if you spend time doing what the reader has pretty much asked you to do, the reader flounces off, skirts swishing in disapproval.

The solution?

The solution is just what you think it is: you don’t set down your story. But you do create the world the reader wants to inhabit.

So let’s say your character is living on a planet, where the atmosphere has large amounts of methane and can easily kill his poor little humanoid self. Here are two options for addressing that fact:

1. Long essay on origin, chemical structure and medical effects of methane, followed by story.
2. Your character really wants to itch his nose, but can’t do so without removing his helmet.

It’s pretty obvious that the second option is the way to go. You will talk less about methane that way, but you’ll tell the reader what they need and want to know. And if the reader cares about your character, then, weirdly enough, they also care about that itchy nose. The fact that the character has a thwarted want, no matter how tiny, is enough to motivate the reader.

So: lead with character – that’s rule #1. (And by the way, that’s why this email is called ‘Glancing sideways, looking straight’. You focus always on character – that’s the straight ahead bit, the narrow path of story proper. But as you’re ploughing forwards, you can glance to the side now and again. That’s the world-building essential to your task - but you never drop the forward motion.)

Rule #2 chases along right behind the first, and it’s this: do less than you think is necessary. The reader won’t care.”

Sometimes the info-dumping can be brief in the extreme. For example, in one of my books, there was an important sequence involving a south Wales cave. I didn’t want readers to feel that I was just springing something on them unannounced – that feels a bit cheaty. Nor could I just assume that readers just knew enough about the geology of Wales to know there were caves. So, many chapters earlier, I had a secondary character say, ‘Those monks. The ones with a brewing licence. They’re up in the Beacons somewhere. Up the valley from that caving place.’

That’s it. Caving established. World built enough for now.

Do you want one more rule? Or maybe just a teeny-weeny guideline? OK:

Rule #3, that’s maybe more of a Guideline: “Deliver information after the reader cries out for it.”

So take that caving issue again. Fiona (who has already figured things out) locates the entrance to a previously unknown cave system. That cave system probably holds the answer to a missing persons case from years before. Fiona has already clocked that, too. Finally, she shows the cave entrance to her superior officer. They sit on a rock and chat:

[Fiona says,] ‘The main cave there is called Dan-yr-Ogof. You want to guess how far it extends underground?’

Burnett shakes his head. ‘I expect you’re about to tell me.’

‘Seventeen kilometres. Eleven miles. One of the main explorers of that system reckons the whole thing will run ninety miles once it’s fully mapped.’

‘You’re saying this . . .  this . . . tunnel here connects with Dan-yr-Ogof?’

I shake my head. ‘Maybe, I’ve no idea. But this whole area is hollow with caves. Ogof Draenen measures seventy undergound kilometres. Ogof Ffynnon Ddu runs to almost sixty. Agen Allwedd runs to over thirty. And there are dozens more as well, a whole sweep of them. The whole southern edge of the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. The chain runs all the way to Abergavenny. Fifty or sixty caves easily and that’s only the ones we know about.’

Burnett joins me on the scree. Says, ‘Fuck.’

Says, ‘Times like this, I’d kill for a cigarette.’

I tell him he doesn’t have to kill anyone. Also—and this is really Murder Planning 1.01—he shouldn’t announce his intentions beforehand, particularly to a detective sergeant whose specialism is in major crime.

All this information is delivered after they’ve found the cave, after Burnett orders Fiona to explore the first few yards of it, after she’s crawled into the tunnel, banged her head and been shocked by the deep darkness of this new world.

The information is also delivered after Fiona has connected the cave’s existence to the missing persons case. So we’ve had some real action, a real (physical, visceral) entrance into this new world, and a sense that this place is strongly connected to a core story thread in the book.

By this point, the reader is totally sold. “Yes, jeepers, caves are important! I want to know more about caves, I can see they’re going to play a huge role in what follows.” So then Fiona tells the reader, in effect, “There are lots of caves in south Wales and some of them are really, really big.”

That settles the reader for now. It gives a sense of the scale of what might lie ahead – and also confirms that the author isn’t tricking. Caves are a perfectly legitimate element in a mystery story set in that particular part of the world.

Notice that there’s still a lot that I haven’t said. What does a cave look like inside? How are they formed? Can you get large bodies of water inside a cave? All that will matter a bit further on into the story, but those bits of information are delivered later, when they’re needed.

And that’s it.

Log cleared.

Lead with character. Do less than you think is necessary. Bring information to the reader only once the reader is thirsting for it.

That’s true for books about Manhattan or Welsh caves or busy hospitals. It’s also true for books about raunchy fairies, star-fleet battles or grumpy dragons.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Info Dumps

OK, I want you to find a place in your book where you have an info dump – much like my material on caving above. My extract above was about 200 words, but only about 150 words had to do with caves, rather than murder planning. So look for an extract of about 200-250 words, but also give us plenty of context that introduces your passage. In that little caving scene, it really mattered that the info came after Fiona had physically been inside the cave (albeit only a very short way.) So give us enough to understand how the information you’re giving us connects to the broader story.

You got that? You got it. Ready – GO. Log in and share your work on Townhouse when you're ready.

Til soon.

Harry

So, you’ve sent your manuscript off to an editor, or your agent, and you’ve received your first set of notes – an exciting, if quite overwhelming, time. This might be the first substantial piece of feedback you have received yet and it’s important to know what exactly to do with the notes you’ve been given. (Please note, I will be getting you to read your manuscript several times…)

Even if you haven’t worked with an editor yet, understanding how to approach feedback will save you time, stress, and rewrites later. Here’s a simple 5-step framework to use to help you get the most out of your editorial feedback:

1. Read the editorial notes thoroughly

This might sound incredibly obvious but read the notes through, in their entirety, a few times. Try not to react to anything specific too quickly and allow the ideas time to percolate. Receiving edits on something you thought you’d nailed, or something that’s very close to you personally, can be quite emotional and your first response might be to jump to your manuscripts defense and scream ‘No! You’re wrong!’ but take a moment to look at everything your editor or agent is suggesting – they are doing so for a reason - and don’t jump into edits straight away. I’d advise reading them through, taking a day or two, and then reading them again.

2. What suggestions do you like? Which ones do you hate?

Now for the next stage, take a look at the suggestions and figure out which ones you think will strengthen your book – hopefully the suggestions you love outnumber anything else. Mark those up (highlight, transfer to your own editorial list etc.) and let the ease of those types of suggestions help with the ones that might be a little more challenging to action. It can really help you get into the swing of the edit if at first you pick out everything that’s doable.

Now for the edits you’re not so sure about…keep in mind that a good editor or agent is there to guide you towards the best version of your book, their suggestions are just that – suggestions. Consider why they’re giving the note they’ve given, is it because what you thought was working isn’t quite there yet? Is it due to something not quite making it to the page enough to translate for the reader? If they’ve highlighted something that isn’t working but you’re not sure their fix is quite right, allow it to spark something else that feels more aligned to your work. This is what an editor or agent is always hoping to provoke.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask questions!

Before diving into making changes, check if there’s anything you need further clarification on. Communicating edits in a letter isn’t always easy – your story is much more nuanced than an editor or agent can express in such a restricted format – so don’t be afraid to ask follow up questions: Is this what you meant here? Can you give me an example where I’ve done that? I think perhaps X would work better here, do you agree?

Getting ahead of any lingering questions before you dive into your edit will be so essential, particularly when you’re sending your manuscript back to your agent – the quicker you get those edits nailed down, the sooner you’ll move to the submission stage (or query stage if you’re working with an editor).

Do I have your attention? Did that click-baity title work?  

I hope so, because (I flatter myself) the tips I’m about to share are really, genuinely important if you want to write a book that resonates with the people who pick it up.  

Best ever advice

The advice that changed my approach to writing – and which I came across at random on the internet – is this:  

A story isn’t about what happens; it’s about how what happens changes the people in the story.  

Apologies to all of you who’ve got thirty-point plot plans full of dragon battles or gruesome serial killings prepared – but those twisty, turny events you’ve dreamt up aren’t as important as you think they are. At least, they won’t be if you don’t make sure they mean something.  

Character arcs – emotional journeys – are the beating heart of every story: the pulse that keeps readers turning the page. If you don’t tie some sort of character development to every dramatic scene you craft, what you’ll be left with is a sequence of ‘and then’ events that no-one really cares about.  

Here, I’m going to offer my top tips for creating characters that will inspire readers to invest in them. I’ll also outline ways you can tie their progress to the external goings-on in your fictional world, ensuring that the big set-pieces you’ve imagined don’t fall flat. 

Characters don't have to be likeable... but we need to understand them

I write commercial women’s fiction: romantic comedies where readers expect to find a protagonist they can root for. This doesn’t mean I have to write fault-free characters, though – and if you’re working in another genre, your scope for crafting someone dark and damaged is even greater. 

However sympathetic (or not) you intend your main character to be, there must be credible reasons why they are the way they are. In other words: what’s their backstory?  

You don’t have to know what they got for their fifth birthday or their favourite flavour of pizza, but you do need to know how they got to where they are at the opening of your novel – both literally and metaphorically.  

Think about Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb: a deeply unpleasant, uncaring alcoholic, washed up on the scrapheap that is Slough House. Not the deadbeat he at first appears, he remains a skilled agent whose instincts are sharp under pressure – but he’s drowning in cynicism (as well as Scotch) thanks to the deep emotional damage wrought by years of MI5 double-dealing.  

Characters need to have problems

And lots of them! If everything is tickety-boo at the start of your story, there’s nowhere for your protagonist to go.  

You don’t need your characters to be miserable, but you might want to show them discontented, frustrated, stuck in a situation that’s stifling them or in denial about the past. Whatever is troubling them, it should be connected to their backstory. 

Your book’s inciting incident or catalyst is your first opportunity to link your plot (the ‘external conflict’ of your story) – to your character’s issues (the ‘inner conflict’). Make sure that whatever happens here deepens the challenge they’re already facing. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the temporary loss of her family home is bad enough for Anne Elliot – but it also sees her thrown back into the orbit of her lost love, Captain Wentworth.  

Consider wants vs. needs

All of this said… your characters don’t need to recognise the pickles they’re in to begin with. In fact, it’s best if what they want – the thing they’re striving for as your book opens – has nothing to do with what they actually need.  

For instance, your protagonist may be working towards a promotion, or to earn their family’s respect. Perhaps they’re desperate to win back an ex-partner or plotting revenge on an enemy. External goals like these, even if they’re achieved, shouldn’t fix the inner conflict characters are ignoring: the trauma rooted in childhood or the pain of their first love deserting them.  

The job of your plot is to guide your character into confronting what’s really going on below the surface. That’s a process of realisation that should take in a variety of highs and lows along the way.  

Marry external events to internal reactions

If you’ve outlined the main events in your book, you’ve probably got a list of key scenes you want to include. These will become true story beats when they’re clearly tied to their effect on your characters. 

How do the events of your novel trouble or challenge your protagonist? How does each incident affect them specifically? Why is something worse for them than it would be for an average person? Personalise everything to raise the stakes for readers and make every plot point matter more. 

This is the difference between a man being involved in a train crash, and him being involved while trying to get home to his dying wife so he can say goodbye to her. A powerful combination of event + emotion is always what you’re aiming for. 

We all know how to write a book, yes?

You start off with some kind of incomplete and dissatisfying status quo. Then something – an inciting incident – comes along to shatter that status quo, and our protagonist is tumbled into motion.

Then – well, stuff happens. Conflict. Turbulence. Ups and downs.

Then we have a good old crisis. Everything is lost. Bond and Lizzie Bennet have lost. Goldfinger is triumphant. Darcy no longer cares for this foolish girl. Then, goodness gracious me, we have a glorious resolution, Bond defuses the bomb, and Lizzie Bennet gets a good old snog from Darcy, Goldfinger is cursing the gods or being carried off in chains, and various cads, bounders and fools all get the fates they entirely deserve.

While we’re busy setting bold styling here, there and everywhere, let’s also note that these excellent plots are powered by Big Questions. Will Lizzie ever find Mr Right? Will Bond manage to save the world?

Fractal geometry says that all these rules apply to scene construction too. That’s something I spoke about yesterday in my Build A Book webinar on scene-building, but I want to pick up on some of that webinar-goodness right now as well.

So it’s sort of obvious when you have a big showdown scene – a No, I Am Your Father type showstopper – you need a properly constructed drama. When you’ve got your protagonist wrestling with the black-cloaked antagonist on a sketchy metal platform above a seemingly bottomless pit, the reader has every right to expect conflict, crisis, resolution – the whole malarkey.

But – you need to deliver the whole malarkey with almost every scene you write.

Here, by way of example, is a short and basically trivial scene from a Fiona book. Fiona has found a mentally ill woman (Shirley) walking the streets and brings her back to psychiatric care. Here’s what happens:

I’ve not been to the Llanrwst Unit before, thank God, so need to be told the way. Shirley accompanies me peacefully enough. Glass doors seal the unit we need access to and we have to be buzzed in by a tough, but friendly looking ward sister, Joan Fredericks. She’s about my age and doesn’t know me.

She summons someone to take Shirley off wherever she needs to be. I say good-bye. She starts to mutter a good-bye, some reflex of politeness buried amidst the scatter of her thoughts.

Then, abruptly, ‘Look after Kath [Shirley’s sister]. You’ll do that, won’t you? Kath. She’s not in the system, you see. But sorry, sorry, I mustn’t . . .’

Her mind tangles up again, lost in its briars. But for that one moment, there was clarity. Blue eyes, unblinking. A steady gaze. Even her hand, I think, lost its micro-tremble.

I say, ‘Yes, Shirley, I’ll do that. I’ll be happy to.’

Off she goes. Thick black shoes on hospital vinyl.

To Fredericks, I say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with her sister is there?’

‘Don’t you worry about nobody. We look after everything.’

That’s not quite an answer, but I don’t pursue it. Just nod at Shirley’s retreating back and ask, ‘What’s the diagnosis?’

Fredericks gives me the kind of stare that’s challenging my right to ask. But I’m a copper and I brought back her patient, so she says, ‘Schizophreniform condition. Formal thought disorders and all this.’ She shrugs. She’s trying to be obstructive, but she’s given me exactly the information I wanted.

‘And she’s in and out, is she? She’s not always cared for here?’

The answer’s yes and no, respectively. Shirley’s on a CTO, a Community Treatment Order, which means she’ll mostly receive care in the community. Sheltered housing. I take a note of her address.

‘Who’s her case officer?’

Fredericks folds her arms across her bosom in a way that only looks right if you’ve got one of those big, black, Jamaican bosoms, which I definitely don’t and she definitely does.

‘Thank you for returning Shirley, but I’m afraid I’m not able to divulge confidential information about patients in our care.’

I like that, actually. Like it a lot. You always worry, as a crazy person, that the people taking care of you are going to neglect your rights and, all too often, you’re right to worry. All the same, I push my warrant card at Fredericks.

‘If you involve the police, the police are involved,’ I say. A statement which gains its logical force from Leibniz’s Law, the identity of indiscernibles.

Fredericks glowers, as if Leibniz is an old enemy of hers. But she unfolds her arms and gives me a name. Mike Wiggins, a psychiatric nurse.

I say, ‘OK, thanks,’ and leave.

We’ve got no sketchy metal platforms, no bottomless pits, no sword fights, no Lords of Evil. The fate of the universe does not rest on the outcome of this encounter.

But there is a Big Question, right? Fiona wants some information. Fredericks is reluctant to give it. So the question is: will Fiona get what she wants?

The status quo (basically tranquil, but somehow dissatisfying) is there too:

Shirley accompanies me peacefully enough … [we are] buzzed in by a tough, but friendly looking ward sister, Joan Fredericks.

That’s a very status-quo-y sort of introduction. It’s peaceful, but there’s a force (the tough Joan Fredericks) which is going to prevent things flowing the way Fiona may want.

That status quo holds for a while, but Shirley’s rambling nudges Fiona to make demands of that immovable object. The nudge is this:

 ‘Look after Kath [Shirley’s sister]. You’ll do that, won’t you? Kath. She’s not in the system, you see. But sorry, sorry, I mustn’t . . .’

Her mind tangles up again, lost in its briars. But for that one moment, there was clarity. Blue eyes, unblinking. A steady gaze. Even her hand, I think, lost its micro-tremble.

I say, ‘Yes, Shirley, I’ll do that. I’ll be happy to.’

That is: Shirley asks Fiona to make her a promise and her muddled mind finds a brief but real clarity in the moment she asks. Fiona says yes and she’s now committed to what follows – this is our inciting incident.

What follows entails conflict and turbulence. This is very low level, of course. This is an early stage of the book. The only drama is a conversation between a police officer (pushy) and a nurse (resistant) where no one is even impolite.

Fiona asks for a diagnosis. Fredericks gives her something, but aims to be as unhelpful as possible. Fiona then asks for a minor follow-up and gets what she wants.

So far, the conflict is exceedingly minor – barely detectable, in fact.

But soon enough, that conflict escalates from resistance to outright refusal, in the form of a ‘big, black Jamaican bosom’ and:

‘Thank you for returning Shirley, but I’m afraid I’m not able to divulge confidential information about patients in our care.’

Woah! In the context of our scene, that’s a crisis. Remember that the Big Question propelling this scene is whether Fiona will get the information she wants, and the answer here seems to be no. That’s the Tiny Scene equivalent of Bond being lasered by Goldfinger, Lizzie being ditched by Darcy.

But – this is a perfect little story, remember, so for every crisis, we have a resolution. Which, in our case, involves the tactical deployment of a seventeenth century mathematician, who got into fights with Newton:

‘If you involve the police, the police are involved,’ I say. A statement which gains its logical force from Leibniz’s Law, the identity of indiscernibles.

Fredericks glowers, as if Leibniz is an old enemy of hers. But she unfolds her arms and gives me a name.

Now, as it happens, the resolution here is a happy one, but it doesn’t have to be. In Tiny Scene land, it doesn’t matter too much if the resolution is or is not happy: your book will have plenty of both outcomes.

There are other differences too.

The inciting incident isn’t fully delivered until 160 words into a 460-word scene: that’s far too slow if you were to stretch things out to novel-length.

Also, the tone here is gently comedic: Jamaican boobs and long-dead Germans. Those things are more or less the opposite of the swordfight-on-the-edge-of-a-precipice type scenes.

But that’s OK too. You can have a tone that’s perfectly Tiny Scene appropriate but which wouldn’t be Whole Novel appropriate. As a matter of fact, if you tell a dark crime story (like this one), then including scenes with a gentle comedy adds a light and diversity that’s probably helpful.

But really, what I want to talk about here is the fractal geometry. How all scenes – not just the Skywalker Meets Darth Vader type ones – follow the basic architecture of story.

If you’re re-reading your book and finding that something doesn’t quite feel right – that the pace feels sludgy, the book seems to be treading water – it’s possible that your Tiny Scene architecture has just collapsed.

What’s always astonishing to me is that readers are fantastically sensitive to these failures. If you have even one scene that fails to deliver on this basic architecture, the reader will feel it. If you have a section of the book that has two or three such failures, you’ll permanently injure the reader’s relationship with the book.

So check your scenes. Do they obey (in miniature) the rules of story? If they do, they’re good to go. If not, then fix them. I honestly doubt if I can find a single coherent scene in one of my Fiona books that doesn’t basically follow the rules I’ve sketched out here. That’s how much it matters.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your Tiny Scene

OK, same as our Build Your Book Month session yesterday, I want you to find a Tiny Scene in your book – maximum of 6-700 words in total, but the shorter and more inconsequential the better. (It’s fine to choose a longer scene, and to cut it down, just for the purposes of Feedback Friday.) Post it in Townhouse here.

Then explain to us what the Big Question in your scene is.

Then paste the whole of your Tiny Scene, but explain the story architecture by inserting these bold headings into your text:

Status Quo

Inciting Incident

Conflict & Turbulence

Crisis

Resolution

What we want to see is that you have a beautifully intact story in place, even in a scene that’s small and apparently unimportant.

Got that? Of course you have.

Crisis? There’s no crisis. Only the sweet, sweet balm of resolution.

Til soon.

Harry

Marketing expert Anna Caig shares an introduction to the world of author branding.

What is an author brand?

‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ Oscar Wilde wasn’t talking about author branding when he said this - but he could’ve been!

An author brand is the foundation for effective book marketing. More than anything, it’s how you make potential readers feel - the impression you give of the world they’ll step into if they open your book.

I’ve worked in marketing for over 20 years and I’ve learnt that the key to a successful brand is embracing what makes you different - the unique set of motivations, inspirations and passions that inform your work. George Saunders calls this each writer’s ‘iconic space, the place from which they write stories only they could write.’

We have all sorts of preconceptions about what branding and marketing is supposed to look like - often shiny, polished and imitative. I’d encourage you to throw these ideas out of the window! One of the mantras I share to my clients is ‘If it sounds like marketing, rewrite it.’ You’re a human being connecting with other human beings.

How to develop your author brand

A big marketing mistake I see people make (not just writers, this is true across all sectors) is trying to appeal to too broad an audience. If you try to engage everyone, you’ll make yourself so boring and formulaic, nobody will see a reason to engage and they’ll just keep scrolling.

Ask yourself the following questions, and note down any words or phrases in your answers that feel significant. It can be helpful to speak out loud. Notice your tone of voice as much as the content of what you say.

• What themes do you find yourself returning to again and again in your writing?
• What impact would you like your books to have?
• What part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
• What aspects of your work do you find yourself thinking about during your down time?
• What inspires you?
• Do you ever feel you’re ‘weird’? In what ways, when and why?
• Why do you write?

Your answers will provide useful raw material from which to craft your public-facing brand.

Your author brand story

A great first step in articulating your brand is to write a brand story. This is a creatively written bio which acts as an engaging invitation into your writing. You’ll use it on your website homepage, email introductions, social media bios, anywhere you have limited space to convey who you are to potential readers.

Look at the notes you made in response to the questions above and select any details you’d like to include. Consider how you’d introduce yourself if you were a character in one of your books - you wouldn’t talk about this person’s CV, you’d use an image or anecdote to make them vivid in the mind of the reader. Apply these same principles to describing yourself. Your storytelling skills are your secret weapon!

But how will I use my author brand? Let’s get practical.

When it comes to content, we know ‘Here’s my book, buy my book’ won’t cut it. We need to find topics, part of our author brand, to talk about consistently.

In those far off and stony days, in that friendless and furless Time Before Rafael, my wife and I watched Bad Sisters, an Apple TV show.

(Now that we have Rafael the Squirrel in our home, we still watch TV, but he’s a menace. Until he decides it’s his bedtime, he jumps around the room, annoying the dog and throwing food everywhere. His favourite snack is crisps, the only thing he doesn’t eat messily. When he does decide it’s bedtime, he goes down either my jumper or my wife’s jumper, rolls onto his back and snuffles and snorts with happiness. We reckon we have about 2-3 weeks more of R the S before he’s ready for the Great Outdoors. He still can’t quite crack a nut without help. But watching dramas broken into 50-minute episodes becomes quite an undertaking if you keep having to break to remove a squirrel from the missus’s hair or trying to get him out of a crisp packet.)

Anyway: Bad Sisters.

The show involves five sisters, one of whom is married to an unpleasant and controlling man, JP. We start the season knowing that JP has recently died and knowing that he was unbeloved of those he left behind. But was he murdered or not? A life insurance investigator wants to prove that he was murdered, and by the team of sisters, and thereby save his ailing insurance business. The cast is very strong. The sense of family and layered histories and relationships and Irish coastal settings are all strong. The comedy? Well, it’s funny but not uproarious. The drama? Well, it’s involving but not edge of the seat. But the whole concoction just works. It’s warm and funny and dark and just about credible enough and dramatic and new and unexpected.

Most of all, though, the basic concept is armour-plated.

Did the sisters kill JP? Well, I won’t tell you that, but I will say that they give it a go … and you won’t know what actually happened till right at the end. The show has a kind of And Then There Were None beauty and necessity to it.

If no one had ever written And Then There Were None (or, for that matter, Murder on the Orient Express), it would be essential for someone to do so. Those concepts have an urgency – a kind of necessity – like an uncompleted mathematical proof that nags at you until it’s done.

Sure enough, the show got a 100% positive review rating on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to secure multiple wins and nominations at various TV awards ceremonies. A great concept, well-executed: that’s the result.

But TV is TV.

If you get a series that everyone loves, you have to have another. In the land of the novel, it’s a bit like that, but not really. In novel-land, the author is the brand, so if you churn out a masterpiece (Pride & Prejudice, say), it’s fine for you to follow up with Emma. You don’t have to write Lizzie and Darcy Have Kids, Lizzie and Darcy Go Travelling, Lizzie and Darcy Sort Out Their Pensions and Go for an Amusing Escapade in France.

But – in TV-land, the brand isn’t the author, or the actor, it’s the show itself. So, yes, you have to force these things into a second series.

But what? Bad Sisters was about killing (or not killing?) JP. Once he’s dead, he’s dead. You can’t really have the sisters try to bump off anyone else: that’s just ludicrous. The story arc has been beautifully completed. Anything else is just artificial and not needed. So yes, another season was commissioned and filmed. But, as Rotten Tomatoes said in its summary of reviews, “The return of Bad Sisters can't help but feel like too much of a good thing, but the lived-in dynamic between these outstanding performers continues to pay highly watchable dividends.”

Basically: the show is pointless, but the actors and characters are great, so … yeah. It’s OK. My wife watched some of it, but lost interest. I’ve not watched a minute of it.

Now, I’m going to guess that many of you will not have a TV show in production with Apple. But all these thoughts still apply to you.

This month is Build Your Book Month. The aim, as you jolly well ought to know, is to give you the tools to plot your book out over the course of a month – in a way that’s structured enough to be disciplined and loose enough to give you creative freedom.

And today is 3 October: the very start of that month. And the purpose of this email is to say: Be More Bad Sisters, Season 1.

You need that level of necessity. You want a reader to think, ‘Wow, why has no one written a book about X, Y, Z before? Good job that someone has finally done so, because that I have to read.’

And that level of necessity has to extend to plot, not just idea. So, for example, “I’d love to write a time-slip novel about three generations of women who have lived in the same house in X.”

And, OK, yeah, fine. But what about those women? What’s the story? What have they been up to? Why do we have to read that tale?

Your job is not to satisfy your own wants as a writer. Your job is to deliver a concept so sharp, it could cut through floating silk.

Don’t try to take a mediocre concept and plot your way to excellence. That’s desperately hard and you can never get to more than 75% success anyway. Start with a terrific concept and then let your plotting become the natural, inevitable playing out of your idea. That works. It always will. And – it’s harder to start, but it’s much easier in the end.

If you want help with getting your concept straight, then:

• Read 11 boxes, 2 imps and 1 owl, a newsletter which involves 11 boxes, 2 imps 1 owl, and also some ideas about elevator pitches.
• Take the first lesson in our Good to Great Video Course. If you’re a Premium Member, you already have access! Please remember to log in first. If you’re not, you can get a free taster lesson here.

I’ll see lots of you 9 October for a bit of Build-Your-Bookery. (I’ll be talking about scene construction, a job which sounds like it should involve some 2x2s and plenty of paint.) My workshop details can be found here.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / From Spark To Story

This week is a little different, it's a takeover from Becca Day. 

Becca wants you to take your spark of an idea and share your novel’s premise in Townhouse. If you didn't catch the first Build Your Book Month workshop, then watch the replay of From Spark to Story with Becca Day. The first workshop is free for everyone to catch up on.

Til soon.

Harry

In today’s blog post, I’m going to be sharing the PERFECT way to plan your plot. It’s the method that trumps all other methods. If you’re not using this method, you’re doing it wrong. 

I joke. I joke. Don’t come at me. 

If you’ve been around the writing world for any length of time, you’ve probably come across all sorts of advice about how to plan your novel. Some people swear by spreadsheets and scene-by-scene breakdowns. Others can’t imagine plotting a single thing in advance, insisting that creativity comes from discovery, not planning. 

It can feel overwhelming, especially if someone claims a particular method is a game-changer and you try it, only to find it just…. doesn’t work for you. 

Here’s the truth: there is no single perfect way to plan your plot. 

And that’s not bad news. If you’re someone who came to this post hoping for a magical answer to your plot woes and feel disappointed, bear with me. The fact that there is no one perfect way to plan a novel is actually great news. 

Writing is personal 

Every writer has a different creative process. For some, plotting every beat in advance provides a safety net. For others, too much structure can feel like handcuffs. And a lot of us fall somewhere in the middle, enjoying a bit of guidance while leaving space for surprises. 

The most important thing isn’t to force yourself into a method that doesn’t feel right, but to experiment until you find the approach that helps you get the words on the page. 

Take me, for example. I’m editing my fifth book (fifth to be published, eleventy-billionth if you include the novels I tried to write before I got published), and even now I’m still experimenting with my process. I’ve tried hardcore plotting: My first and second books had spreadsheets that may have called my sanity into question. I’ve tried pantsing: My third book was written with a vague idea of the beginning and ending in mind. And I’ve tried doing a bit of both, which seems to work better for me, but even now I still experiment with how much plotting works for me. 

We’re about to dive into Build Your Book Month, which has a snazzy tagline of ‘outline your entire novel in 1 month’. This headline can sometimes scare people. They think, ‘I’m not a plotter so none of this will be relevant to me’. But the way we’ve designed this month is not to force a particular method on you, but to explore different aspects of story that you should think about before or as you write, whether that’s mapping it out in a spreadsheet or just turning ideas over in your head. 

Plotters, Pantsers, and everyone in between 

Writers often divide themselves into two camps: 

• Plotters carefully map out their stories before writing. They might use beat sheets, the Three-Act Structure, or even a chapter-by-chapter outline. They like knowing where the story is headed and feel more confident when they can see the big picture. 

• Pantsers (short for “seat-of-your-pants” writers) dive straight into drafting without a clear plan. They thrive on discovery, letting the characters take the lead and uncovering twists as they write. 

But a lot of writers actually live in the grey area between these extremes. Maybe you sketch a rough outline but let it shift as you go (this is what I do). Maybe you write the first act freely, then pause to outline the rest. The beauty is that there’s no wrong way to do it as long as it gets you writing. Maybe you plan out the direction of the story, but you do it all in your head before drafting that scene. 

During Build Your Book Month, you’ll get to experiment. Want to see how character flaws can generate plot? That’s exactly what Liz Monument will cover in Designing Characters That Drive the Plot. Curious how multiple POVs could work in your novel? My Multiple POVs Without the Chaos workshop has you covered. 

The point isn’t to pick sides. It’s to discover what blend of planning and discovery helps you finish your novel.