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As an agent who’s been taking submissions for over ten years, I’ve seen authors make every mistake you can imagine – and a handful of really imaginative ones you honestly can’t. But when it comes to non-fiction, there are a few that crop up time and time again.  

I’ve invaded your regular Jericho newsletter this week to let you know the five mistakes I’d most like all the non-fiction writers out there to stop making. Starting with… 

Writing your book upfront 

Don’t do this, because the vast majority of non-fiction books aren’t acquired off the back of a full manuscript.  

Unlike in fiction, over here in non-fiction we primarily work with proposals. This is a shorter 35-50 page document that is effectively a business pitch for your book. It tells an editor what your book is, what it’s for and who’s going to read it, as well as including a decent amount of sample material to demonstrate that you can do all the amazing things you’re promising to do.  

Save yourself a lot of time by starting here. 

Figuring out your argument as you go 

When you’re writing that proposal, don’t develop your argument in the process. I’ve seen so many proposals that read as the author picking their way towards what they want to say, but there’s nothing harder to edit into a completed proposal than purpose.  

Know what your book is for and use that purpose as the spine of your proposal, everything starts from there. I once turned to two writers co-authoring a book and told them that I loved their proposal, and that I could clearly see the journey they went on to figure out what they wanted to say. Then I told them to scrap it all and start again, with that end point as the new starting point. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear, but the next draft of the proposal was terrific. 

Writing a book that someone else could write 

Don’t write a book that someone else could write. The thoughts, ideas, experiences and arguments have to be content that can’t be found elsewhere. Otherwise, they will be found elsewhere – there’s simply too much out there.  

Your book needs a USP if you’re going to reach your market and a big part of that USP should be you. Maybe not you personally, but your unique research, interest or niche knowledge.  

And as a follow-on to this that I’ve only had to add on in the last few years – don’t write a book that a Large Language Model (LLM – generative AI) could write. If you’re synthesising other people’s ideas and research into an accessible format, and if those ideas are broadly available, then you’re going to struggle. People go to non-fiction for unique expertise. If an LLM could write your book, it’s not going to be easy to ask someone to pay to read it from you. 

Writing a book that’s not ‘actionable’ enough 

Here’s another one I see time and time again. Don’t write a book that only feels useful in the hands of policy makers. Readers want books that are going to affect their lives, they want you to change their minds or change their behaviour, and they want your book to feel empowering. If you write 75,000 words about a specific aspect of how terrible the world is and then 5,000 words about the high-level global policy changes that need to happen to fix it, your reader is going to emerge from your book downhearted and disempowered.  

Instead, give your reader things they can use. If your book is issues-led, let them know what they can do to address those issues (and I don’t mean telling them to vote better!). If you’re looking over your manuscript and can’t see what the reader is meant to take away from it, then you might have more work to do. This needs to be a book that you can imagine every reader pressing into the hands of their neighbours, parents and colleagues. If you can’t imagine them doing that, ask yourself how your book needs to change until you can. 

Focusing too much on social media 

Finally, this one might seem counterintuitive but – don’t build a platform. You’ve probably heard people saying that platform is hugely important in non-fiction. And it is! But the kind of platform we’re talking about is not something you’re likely to be able to build on a reasonable timeframe.  

When we discuss platform, we’re often talking about platform-led books. That is to say, we find an author with a huge platform (a consistently top-ranking podcast, a popular business course, a food-themed Instagram with a hundred thousand followers) and we get them to write a book that appeals to their audience.  

The important thing is that the profile comes first. It wasn’t built for the book, the book was built out of it. If you don’t already have that, there’s nothing you can do about that, and trying to build a profile from scratch will likely work against you. In lots of ways, having no profile is better than having a small one, and profiles in the early stages of being built look a lot like profiles that aren’t doing very well. Your time is better spent making your material so unputdownable that profile stops mattering. 

That was a lot of don’ts. I want to leave you with some positivity. So yes, it’s tough, but yes, you should do it anyway. Do write the proposal. Do edit and redraft and revise until you fall asleep at your keyboard. Do remember why you love this subject and why it’s so important that everyone else falls in love with it too. Do bring us into a world we’d never have access to otherwise and do let your passion for it sing out from every page.  

People will tell you it’s hard – it is. Do it anyway. 

Want more advice from Eli? He is available for one-to-one sessions where you can chat about your book idea, next steps and potential publishing options. Book yours here!  

In my 20+ years as an editor, one of my greatest joys has been working with authors who write historical fiction. For one thing, when I work alongside historical novelists, I get to learn all about the places, people, and events of another era.  

Moments from the past come alive through characters, dialogue, and descriptive detail. Often, I also learn about a lesser-known or hidden history, as was the case with Rhys Bowen’s The Rose Arbor, which featured the sad fate of a Dorset village that was used for military training during World War II, or Caroline Laurent’s An Impossible Return (winner of the Prix Maison de la Presse), a haunting novel about how the inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean were driven from their island home. 

I’ve also realized in my work that as much as history can fascinate an author, to the point they decide to dedicate months or years to exploring it in a story, writing a novel-length work of historical fiction has plenty of frustrations, too. After all, without a time machine, how can you really know if you’re getting it right?  

How much research is enough, and how can you keep moving forward when you feel like there’s so much you still don’t know? What happens when there are gaps in the historical record, or when you want to create a page-turner but the true timeline of events is painfully slow? 

Whether you’re just dipping your toes into a topic or you’ve already got a draft, here are a few tips for writing convincing historical fiction without getting lost down a research rabbit hole… 

1. Don’t let what you don’t know stop you 

For many authors, inspiration for a historical novel strikes when they first visit the place that will become their setting, or when they learn of a little-known fact that sparks a surge of curiosity. How can the world not know about this absolutely astonishing series of events? They nobly take up the charge of adapting it into a story, only to realize just how much they must learn to depict another time and place authentically.  

It’s an overwhelming feeling, and it can arise again and again over the course of drafting an historical novel – not just at the outset. And while yes, you need to do your research, you’ll also need to make progress even when you don’t know everything. (Spoiler alert: You’ll never know everything!) This means managing your writing process with some semblance of a system.  

For Emily Matchar, author of In the Shadow of the Greenbrier and The Lost Girl of Craven County, this meant deciding to draft 500 words six days a week and then researching and revising on the seventh. For Emily, modest goals (500 words is just two pages a day) and a simple system led to steady, consistent progress.  

Beyond setting a realistic goal, to get to the end of a draft, you’re going to need to give yourself permission to do the best you can with what you know for now, and to fill in the gaps in your knowledge at a later point. It’s absolutely okay to write in your manuscript “More research needed here.” Keep going, and add detail later. 

2. Stay organized  

You already know you need to do your research, but you’ll also need to organize it. A tool like Scrivener might be helpful for keeping your discoveries gathered in one place, but you can also keep it simple with a folder on your desktop or in Google Drive. If you’re doing online research, a bookmark folder in your browser can help keep track of links to return to later.  

Document your sources and make sure to note where you’ve found quotes and statistics so you don’t have to chase those down at a later date. If you’re working with primary sources in a library or archive, download a scanner app to photograph and upload key pages to your research folders.  

Dedicate some space to images, maps, and other visual inspiration. Some authors create a physical vision board for this and put it up in their workspace, and others use online tools. Whatever tools you use, set aside some time each month to organize your materials, assess what resources you might still need, and keep chaos at bay. 

3. Let the facts serve the fiction 

Most historical authors run into a sticky problem at least once in their process: sometimes, the facts just don’t make for compelling fiction, and no amount of research will remedy that. Maybe an event that needs to feel important and urgent in the story actually unfolded at a snail’s pace over a series of years. Maybe the king’s key advisor was actually five different people. Perhaps a form of technology your protagonist needs is still a few years off.  

Kelly Scarborough, an alum of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and author of Butterfly Games (an IPPY Bronze Medal winner), did extensive research to write her novel (and even learned Swedish!). And yet, some of what she uncovered wasn’t well suited to a story that kept readers turning pages. That meant she had to find her own boundary between being true to the historical record and ensuring she told a great story.  

Every historical novelist makes choices about when to stick to the facts and when to let drama lead the way. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but it’s normal to prioritize, at least to some extent, fictionalization over factual fidelity. After all, you’ve chosen to write a novel rather than a nonfiction account. An author’s note at the end of the book is a great place to let readers in on what’s fact and what’s fiction. 

4. Class is NOT in session 

While one of the things we love about historical fiction is its potential to open our eyes to other moments in time, readers are sensitive to being lectured, taught, or told about something the author has excavated in their research. This is especially true when details are unrelated to characters or key developments, or when it seems like they’re included primarily to demonstrate the extent of the author’s knowledge.  

Exhaustive, pages-long catalogs of the various planes used in World War II, or the full text of a speech made by a famous historical figure, are likely to make the reader’s eyes glaze over. Maggie O’Farrell researched Shakespearean England exhaustively to write Hamnet, but she’s extremely selective about her details. She never lectures, and the result is a credible, cohesive story world.  

Bottom line: Of all the research you do for your book, only a portion of it should appear in the actual manuscript.  

5. Be at peace (well, try…) with not getting it all right  

At the end of the day, even the most meticulous researchers are not going to ensure their novel is 100% accurate to the historical record, and that’s okay.  

Keep learning, keep writing, and keep striving to tell a great story. Your readers will thank you! 

Books mentioned in this post: The Rose Arbor by Rhys Bowen, An Impossible Return by Caroline Laurent, In the Shadow of the Greenbrier and The Lost Girl of Craven County by Emily Matchar, Butterfly Games by Kelly Scarborough, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. 

Lindsey Alexander is a tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. To find out more about the course, visit the web page or fill in this form and we’ll send the brochure straight to your inbox. Want to sense-check your story idea? Fancy meeting Lindsey one-to-one to see how working with her could help you? Book a twenty-minute mentoring session with her here. If you go on to study with us, we’ll credit the cost of the session back to you. 

Ah, me, elsewhere in the world, people take holidays. They lie on beaches, they swim in lakes and rivers, they drink chilled wine looking out at old castle walls and honeyed stone.

That is not the life of a writer, nor should it be. For you, my dear writer friend, the way is hard, high and stony. August is the season where you feverishly complete, edit and perfect that manuscript of yours. September is when you aim to submit that beautiful work to literary agents – after they have enjoyed their holidays, and before they plunge into the madness of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

But Planet Agent is not your planet and you need to know the rules of that strange land before you seek to enter.

How many agents?

I generally recommend that you approach between 10 and 12 agents, all chosen for their openness to your kind of writing. I think it makes sense to have two or three relatively senior agents on that list. But I think the bulk of your list should probably be made up of younger, hungrier agents. (I tried dictating this email, and that sentence came out as ‘younger, Hungarian agents.' And yes, I think every good shortlist needs a few Magyars.)

I really don't recommend a strategy of just going out to 3-4 agents. There's too high a risk that personal taste, or a period of intense busyness, means you will get rejections where you shouldn't.

I also don't like a strategy of just hitting 50 or more agents. I think that is needlessly burdensome on the industry. But even from your own point of view, if you need to go to 50 agents to get one acceptance, it's worth pausing and asking whether the submission pack and manuscript needs another look. There just aren't that many publishers out there, and publishers are even more choosy than agents. So, if you are not getting acceptances from the first 10-12 agents you approach, it may be worth taking another look.

How long to wait?

An Earth day lasts for 24 hours. A day on Jupiter lasts just 10 hours. A single day on Mercury lasts about 2 Earth-months. A single day on Venus lasts more like 8 months, which is why, when you meet Venusians, they’re always tired.

A day on Planet Agent sits somewhere between an Earth Day and a Mercury Day in terms of length – let’s say, around 3-6 earth days in total.

So when an agent asks you to wait 8 weeks to get back to you, you have to remember that in their world, that only feels like 1-2 weeks, which seems perfectly reasonable. Indeed, you should divide all agent-periods by a factor of between 3-6, and adjust your expectations accordingly.

All this is just to say that if you send a book off by 1 Sept, you shouldn’t fret at all if you’ve heard nothing back by 30 Sept.

Loads of agents now say, ‘If you haven’t heard from us within 8 weeks, then it’s a no.’ I do think that’s unacceptably sloppy, to be honest – agents in my view do have an obligation to the vast horde of unpublished writers who form the industry’s feedstock and future – but it is what it is. If an agent says that, then take them at face value. If they don’t mention a cut-off, then it’s OK to nudge gently, and only once, and not before 6-8 weeks.

The art of the nudge

If you’ve had no acceptance or full manuscript request, then your nudge needs to be a short, polite one-off. In effect, “I sent you X on Y date. I’d be very grateful if you could let me know your response. If I hear nothing back, I’ll assume the manuscript is not of interest.”

And honestly? Those nudges are not likely to be answered and seldom secure the outcome that you want. But sometimes you just need to nudge for your own sweet satisfaction.

Someone asks you for a full MS

If you have had a full manuscript request, things are very different. At that point, you fly into action. You write immediately to every other agent who is outstanding on your shortlist, and you say, in effect, “I have just received a full manuscript request from another literary agent. I remain keen to hear your thoughts. I have reattached my submission material here. Do let me know if this manuscript is of interest to you.”

That’s the nudge. Don’t nudge again. But it’s fine to do that. You should do it, indeed.

Someone offers you representation

If you have not merely had a request, but an offer of representation, then tell everyone that, apart from those who have positively rejected you, of course.

Again, the message is, “I’ve been offered representation. I remain very keen to hear from you, however. Please shift your ass and get back to me.” You may want to rephrase some parts of that, of course, but that’s the general gist.

Remember that your Goal #1 is to secure representation. If you hit that goal, you’ve won, but it might be a sketchy 1-0 win on a boggy pitch under fog. A win’s a win, of course, but really you want to secure Goal #2, which is a choice of agents.

If you’re doing work on your house, you might get quotes from 2-3 plumbers, 2-3 carpenters and so on. Only then, do you feel you have a reasonable chance of getting the work done and when and how you want. That should be your goal with agents too. You want to be in the position of interviewing them, not just swooning into their arms, like a giddy maiden with a too-tight corset.

More Etty Kett

I’ll do a second agent-etiquette email next week (or maybe the week after), so do please get back to me with any questions that you want answered.

And if you want to get a bit of an insider’s view before you start approaching agents, we also offer Agent One-to-One Feedback Sessions. By the way: this isn’t about getting an agent to represent you. It’s about making sure you’re putting your best possible submission in front of them when the time comes.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Query letters

Let’s see your query letter then. Doesn’t even matter if you’re not at the query stage. Just draft it up and let’s take a shufti.

(From Google, for baffled non-Brit readers: To "take a shufti" means to have a quick look or a brief glance at something. The phrase comes from Arabic military slang picked up by British, Australian, and New Zealand troops stationed in the Middle East.)

Upload your work here whenever you're ready. 

Til soon.

Harry

With the frightening rise of every sort of -ism out there, the need for diversity, representation and inclusion in MG fiction is more important than ever. We all recognize the power of children seeing themselves, their faith, their cultures, their families and friends, reflected in the books they read, and the publishing industry has made great strides in the past decade or so, but… we still have a long way to go.

This is particularly true in regards to stories which feature diverse representations of children’s abilities and disabilities. With the recent launch of the SEND Inclusive Publishing Pledge, we now have statistics to illustrate what such inclusion should look like. If 1 in 5 students in primary education in the UK have some sort of SEND (special educational need or disability), then surely the books we write need to match this reality.

Brilliant authors, such as Elle McNicholl, Lisette Auton and recent Carnegie queen, Beth O’Brien, have contributed massively to increasing disability inclusion and representation in kidlit. I feel very lucky to have added Mizzy’s voice in the past year or so.

As her name suggests, Mizzy Maypole is a reimagining of Agatha Christie’s little old lady, Miss Marple, who defies all expectations with her brilliant sleuthing. In Mizzy’s case, our unsuspected detective is an almost-12-year-old-girl with Down Syndrome who, although constantly underestimated (especially by her older, cooler cousins), is determined to show the world she’s actually a very brilliant detective (and smash a few stereotypes along the way).

Book three in the Mizzy Mysteries comes out next year and I am one hundred percent committed to writing more books which champion representation and inclusion, not only with neurodivergent main protagonists, but also peopled with a cast of supporting characters which reflects the reality of 1 in 5 children with SEND in every school. However, the inclusion of more disabled characters in books is not enough on its own. These characters must be carefully and sensitively created, whilst also being fully-realized personalities, rather than token stereotypes.

My experience writing Mizzy has taught me 5 key points to keep in mind:

1. Not about me, without me.

This is actually a rule, not a point to keep in mind. Do not write a main character, unless you share their diagnosis, have been invited to co-create, or have a wealth of professional or personal experience. The last thing any of us wants to do is commit cultural appropriation or be guilty of PC window-dressing. Even if you have disability-adjacent experience, perhaps as a parent or a sibling to with a specific SEND, and especially as in my case, professional experience gained through teaching or therapeutic support, choose very carefully whether you can authentically write from a first-person perspective, or even a close-third. Although I benefitted hugely from the support of the Down syndrome community, I doubt I would write Mizzy in quite the same way again.

2. Lift up disabled creators

Wherever possible lift up disabled creators. For example, the Mizzy mysteries have showcased the talents of two creators with Down syndrome: Mizzy’s wonderful family-tree illustrator Lester Magoogan and her bewitchingly talented (and now award-winning) audiobook narrator Poppy Mae-Barret.

3. Don't make it up

I know. Fiction writers make stuff up all the time. But some things need to be real: out of basic human respect but also to make sure kidlit isn’t suddenly swamped with stereotypes, but with authentic, fully-formed characters.

Which means… research. Love it or hate it, if you do not share the SEND in question, in order to write authentic characters, you cannot avoid it. Preferably your research will be in real, live person with actual people who live with whichever disability you want to represent and include. And don’t meet just one person. As with any random group, people with Down syndrome are as endlessly varied as people who don’t have Down syndrome and, a phrase which was burned into my brain during my speech and language therapy training, if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person (and I’m saying this as one autistic person). Above all, please, please, please, don’t try to make do by rewatching Rain Man…

4. Do make it up

This is not to cancel out what we just talked about, but to add to it (I never promised this would be easy). Just like any other character you write, a character with a SEND needs to be so much more than just a list of abilities and disabilities. Once you have done your research, flesh out the detail with everything else that the character wants, fears, loves, hates. All the stuff you know how to do. The stuff which makes your characters live and breathe and wiggle their way into your readers’ hearts.

5. Sensitivity Readers

Please don’t leave this step to your publisher. Don’t wait till you’ve finished your manuscript either. View sensitivity reads as a collaboration with the individuals and families you connected with during your research. Share chapters, incorporate feedback, share them again. It’s a time-consuming process but a vital component of writing authentic, inclusive characters. 

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Writing authentic, inclusive characters is challenging and there are far more considerations than the five I have flagged up here. But, as they say, if something is worth doing…, Now, more than ever, increasing the empathy and understanding we know comes from reading about other peoples’ realities — not to mention the boost to self-esteem seeing ourselves reflected in a story can bring — diversity, representation and inclusion in kidlit feels more vital than ever.

If you’re staring at a blank screen, wondering how to start writing your novel, try answering these five questions...  

1. Which books do you love reading? 

We tend to write the kinds of books we love to read, so you already know a bit about your not-yet-written-novel. It will share some features with books you’ve loved. Can you see a common theme in your favourite books (even if, like me, you forget the detail the minute you finish)?  

I notice that I love books where human lives and relationships are put under a microscope – a group of friends away for a weekend; a long-term friendship tested; familial bonds between parents and children through the years or generations; sibling groups, gathering around an event; a romantic relationship doomed, challenged, stretched to breaking; the gap between what we hope for and what life gives us; the consequences of our bad choices; jealousy, grief, ambition, desire, mortality. I also love books set in a particularly memorable and soul-stirring setting, where the setting almost becomes another character. 

Try writing down the common features of books you love (as I have above) and scribble ideas around it. Let the books you’ve loved water your imagination. Let your reading become your writing.

2. Which emotions feel most familiar to you? 

This is a hard question with a probably private answer, and as we think of writing a novel, we need to be willing to visit the most private parts of ourselves. Yes, we can write a book from our socially acceptable holding-it-all-together self, but our book is likely to grab the reader much more if we dig down to the deeper places.  

Do you worry more than you’d like to? Then perhaps your main character might do the same. Do you have deep-rooted fears you’ve never shared with anyone? Might those fears kick-start a plot? Is there something that makes you furious? Can you unleash that something into your novel? What disgusts you or thrills you? Let us be disgusted or thrilled with you. What makes you cry? It will make us cry too. When a novel is growing inside me, about to burst through, I find I get (and now expect to get) a feeling. A feeling about what the meaning of home might be (book one), a feeling of profound and unspecified yearning (book two), a flash of profound wonder about the beauty of this world which I can’t hang on to or make last (book three), a feeling of deep regret about a teenage choice (book four). All these feelings became novels for me. 

Be somewhere alone where you won’t be disturbed (even for five minutes) and allow yourself to feel whatever you feel. Let your feeling become your writing. 

3. What’s your relationship with time – past, present, future?  

This might sound like a weird question, but time frames everything, doesn’t it? And perhaps the easier question is whether you have a strong interest in the past, and would like to set your novel in an era that has always fascinated you. You’ll need to enjoy research if so.  

Or, would you like the freedom to create a new future? Alternatively, would you rather set your book in the present, or at least within the limits of your lifetime? That’s the first thing.  

But there’s a second thing. Can you take your own tendencies and expand them, intensify them, nudge them in a new direction? Do you have nostalgic tendencies that you can exaggerate and pass to your main character? Might a tendency to rewrite/rose-tint/sugar-coat the past create obstacles and misunderstandings in the plot?  Or are you tempted to miss the present in pursuit of the future? Could your main character trample over the present (and the people in it) in order to fulfil a future (realistic or unrealistic) goal? Could this be part of the plot of your novel? Some over-riding goal or ambition or obsession which causes the main character to destroy all that gets in his or her way? Do you have a tendency to get bored with the present? Can you exaggerate this so it becomes a part of your plot or characterisation? Do you find it hard to plan ahead? Can you dial this up into a kind of phobia? How might it affect your main character’s life? Could a refusal to look ahead taint or even destroy what the character most values? 

Notice your own relationship with time, and let it bleed into your characters’ lives.

4. Which places have had an impact on your life? 

For me, the setting of my novel is crucial, and even when a feeling is growing inside me (home/yearning/wonder/regret), it doesn’t become a story until I know where it’s set. The settings for my first three books came very easily: my beloved southern Spain – the Cádiz coast and the city of Córdoba – followed by two fictional Northumbrian islands and the Norfolk Broads.  

But for book four, I couldn’t find the setting until I had a conversation with my husband about the places that had meant the most to me. Suddenly, bang, there it was: Mudeford Spit, in Dorset, a finger of sand surrounded by ocean and attached to land at only one end. The feeling that was already forming in me (regret/the consequences of a bad choice/the possibility of redemption) joined with the setting of the spit, like the sperm and egg (!), and the main character was born, carrying her story with her.   

Can you feel your setting coming into focus? If not, write a list of places that have made an impression on you across your life. 

5. What do you know that nobody else knows? 

Reading a lot helps us write well. No doubt about it. We hear the music and the rhythm in the words other authors write. We marvel at the twists and turns of their plot. Our job is not to copy our favourite author or favourite book, but to be inspired by them.  

If we try to copy, it follows that the best we can be is second-best. But if we allow ourselves to be ourselves, which is what all these questions are about, we will be the best. The best at being the writers that we are.  

Immediately, you may hear a voice in your head saying that you’re not interesting enough, or your life isn’t big enough, that being you won’t qualify you to be a novelist. But it will. We all have a particular character and a particular past and a particular present and a particular set of circumstances. We all feel things in a particular way. We all know things: how to tie knots, or make elderflower wine, deliver a baby, put up a tent, crochet a hat, forage for mushrooms. We all have passions and obsessions and niche bits of knowledge.  When we combine these with our own unique character and circumstances, the books we’ve read, the emotions we feel, the places we love and the way we experience time, then this combination will give us our story, and our voice. And because we are all human, readers will respond to our humanity, and dare to think and feel things they’ve felt and thought but couldn’t articulate... or be inspired to think and feel new things through who you are and what you will create. 

Write a list of your niche stuff: themes, topics, hobbies, people, eras, space, nature, countries, jobs, skills, gifts, experiences. Things that have marked your life in some way. Allow them to feed your story and give it your unique signature. 

Joanna Glen is the lead tutor on our Novel Writing For Beginners course. Want to hear more about it? Fill in this form and we'll send some information direct to your inbox, or visit the web page to get all the details you need.

I’m not the first person with a chronic illness to have endured their fair share of warrior analogies. I am ‘fighting a battle at cellular level’, ‘winning the war’, or not. Being a writer and having a fight on your hands have something in common: the journey is laborious, sometimes painful, and above all, victory isn’t promised.

When I was asked how I keep going (beyond dogged determination and a Type A personality that won’t quit), I realised the advice I might give to someone newly diagnosed applies to aspiring authors too.

1. Follow your dreams now, not later

Time is finite, energy too. I wrote my debut A Healthy Appetite with a feverish determination over the course of around eight months. Thankfully, not everyone has the same frantic worry I did, that I wouldn’t be around to see my story to the finish line. Cancer reminds you perpetually that ‘time is of the essence’ and as we all know, publishing moves at a languorous pace. Showing up to the laptop when I had the energy, I told myself I was one step closer to realising my dream. It’s an effective spur that: write now or never

2. Find your cheerleaders

I’m a sucker for positive reinforcement. Daily, I dish it out to students in the classroom, but as adults we receive way less of it. Writing a novel can be an isolating, thankless ordeal; community takes the edge off. If you can, connect with like-minded writers in your genre who might be up for a critique partner swap. I loved sharing weekly snippets from my work in progress with a writer pal and found it encouraged a delicious momentum. If I didn’t have anything new for them each week, I’d miss out on the praise and insight that helped me to keep going.

3. Rebound from rejection fast

Spoiler alert: there’s no way around rejection. I signed with my agent on book three and before that, racked up more rejections than I’d care to count. On my laptop are several spreadsheets of them, a flood of reds for ‘manuscript rejected’ and a handful of full requests which eventually ran red too. I entered lots of competitions and made it nowhere, but I didn’t give up. For every no I tried again. Eventually, I was longlisted for two awards and had several offers of representation, proving that persistence really does pay off.

4. Get out there

I say this tentatively. We can’t attend every weekend-long industry extravaganza, but if opportunity calls and you can, do. Writing courses are a brilliant way to make connections and improve your craft. There are a range available for writers in the UK and beyond, most of them offering industry insight and a means of hearing from editors, agents and authors. In person events are brilliant too. I first met my agent at the Jericho Writer’s London Festival of Writing. In the room buzzing with all the other agents and nervous authors, she told me she wanted to read the rest of my novel. I hadn’t even finished a first draft. I remember us parting that day – giddy from self-belief – with a promise to get back in touch. And we did, months later. The rest is history.

5. Stay present, not two steps ahead

There’s a chance you already know too much. You’ve stalked The Bookseller’s deals announcements and have calculated the odds of a book selling in the current climate. If you can, while you’re drafting, avoid learning too much about the reality of publishing before your novel is written and ready to be submitted to agents. Pouring over the sometimes-disenchanting statistics is demotivating and leads to a reluctance to engage with your work. Fall in love with your story first, then ask someone else to do so later.

So how do we keep going, even now? 

In a nutshell, I’m sorry to say that there isn’t a straight line from wanting to getting, but a series of side quests and setbacks. The good news? You don’t have to do it alone. Find your community and invest in it now – the pay off later is incredible.

Katie Huttlestone is the author of the forthcoming novel A Healthy Appetite which will be released by Dead Ink Press in August 2026. Delightfully dark and addictive, A Healthy Appetite is a ravenous tale of morality vs mortality, that asks how much of yourself would you give up to become healthy?

Worldbuilding is what draws your readers into your narrative. When people remember science fiction or fantasy books, it tends not to be the plot that they revel in, but a general sense of what the world was like: the plains of Rohan, or the hellish mountains of Mordor, or the great desert planet of Dune. 

Successful world-building should feel effortless. There are two major forms of fantasy: the portal, and the entirely fantastical. Both, however, come with the same problems, as the reader must not be subjected to large amounts of exposition, in dialogue or otherwise. Some people like to build their worlds inside out, knowing exactly how the economy works, and how many kings or presidents there were, and so forth. Others like to be more painterly and impressionistic, simply giving a little touch here and there to suggest something.  

You, of course, can find your own balance between these two, and sometimes the former approach doesn’t work. If you are working in the realm of fable, for example, we don’t need to know exactly what it is that the dwarves were mining, and who they sold it to, and how they sustained themselves in the hut in the woods. But if you are dealing with something where you are aiming for the realistic - and yes, this can happen even in fantasy and sci fi - then you would need to work all that out. 

Bad world-building is easy to spot. Names are particularly revealing: some people just choose random names and hope for the best; others will go into great detail in terms of etymology and meaning. Again, finding a sweet spot between the two will help you understand what kind of writer you are. 

You can build up from something simple, like a boy in a village; or you can build down from something, like a planet made entirely of ice. But either way, there has to be a sense of wholeness, and a sense that this is a world that actually exists, just as much as ours does.  

It’s worth remembering that world-building is something realist novelists do as well – readers just don’t notice it as much. 

Here, then, are six tips on how to build your fictional world successfully. 

1. Develop encyclopaedic knowledge

Of course you don’t have to make an actual encyclopedia; but it is very helpful to have a world-building document alongside your manuscript, to which you can refer.  

This can contain information such as what countries are in the world, what their systems are, what kinds of names the characters have, and so forth. This information can then appear more naturally in the weave of the novel.  

The more you know your world, the more readily the information will flow out of your pen (or keyboard) in a convincing way. 

2. Consider geography and weather 

It really helps to have some sense of the kind of world your characters inhabit. You can draw simple maps (even if, like me, you can’t draw.) Is it forested? Is it mountainous? Where do the rivers lead?  Is there another country beyond that mountain range?  

You don’t need to go too far (well, you can if you like), but a general sense of direction is absolutely necessary. Setting helps to define both character and plot, so having a strong sense of yours will help with other aspects of your writing. 

3. History and memory matter 

When we walk down the street, we take in statues, road names, plaques and so on, without really thinking about it. Your characters should do the same. “Mendaro ran down King Vilnius-platz, avoiding the railings around the shining bronze statue of the country’s first monarch” is much better than “Mendaro ran down King Vilnius-plazt which had been named after the country’s first king.”  

Similarly, we all have personal histories, and that can really help to liven things up. When a character walks past a building, he or she can remember what happened there: “Alvo never liked to go past the Titan Temple if he could help it. The shadow of what had happened to Old Bruno seemed to live there, staining the air itself…”

4. Sensation can make a story 

New fantasy writers often forget that we are rooted in the physical, and that the senses themselves inform how we act within the world. Think of warm baking smells, and newly-cut grass; think of polluted air and the smell of petrol.  

The more your characters can interact with the world in that sensory way, the better. 

5. Remember you need rules

If you are writing about magic, then the magic should have limits. Magic is simply a metaphor, in any case, and giving magic to protagonists means that they need to grapple with it: learn it, understand its purpose, and understand what the effect of using the magic is.  

Imagine if, in order to defeat a Dark Lord, your character had to perform a rite that involved killing someone - and not just someone, but a good person. Would it still be worth it?  

Those kinds of questions help to inform the philosophical underpinnings of your novel. 

6. And finally… enjoy yourself 

I think this is absolutely paramount. Building up a fictional world is quite simply one of the most enjoyable activities that a human can do. You are in control! You can make the mountains green, or the seas red, or people eight feet tall, as long as it all hangs together.  

I think too many people come to world-building having ingested a lot of fantasy tropes - orcs, elves, and so forth - and I think the really enjoyable part comes in thinking about these tropes and how you can break away from them. It really helps if your fantasy world has a purpose. Fantasy is a way of exploring our world, and you can do that in your world-building with a great deal of fun. 

Philip Womack is a tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. To find out more about working with him on your novel over 8 or 12 months, fill in this form or book an exploratory one-to-one where you can chat with him about your story idea. These sessions cost just £20, and this fee is fully refundable if you go on to book mentoring or study with us. 

The most important sentence you will write is the first one. It’s the one from which everything else flows. The one that sets the story running. The one that helps everything else take shape. 

It’s also the first sentence that your readers are going to judge. That includes agents, publishers, critics and anyone else who can damn your book to oblivion or raise it to the stars. 

No pressure there, then... 

Even so, I don’t want you to panic. I don’t even want you to worry too much about getting those initial words down. Because the important thing to remember is that the first thing you write isn’t necessarily the first thing that everyone else will see. Nothing is set in stone – or fixed to  the page – until the book goes off to the printers.  

I’m not going to pretend that you don’t need to worry about those first impressions. In fact, since I’ve already made you feel nervous, let me also add that it’s not just about that first sentence. The subsequent few sentences, paragraphs and pages are also vital to your success. There’s no getting around it. Your opening does really matter. 

But I’m also going to insist that you shouldn’t allow intrusive thoughts about the importance of first impressions to hold up the rest of your writing. Over-thinking that opening and worrying about its consequences can be paralysing. It can stop you getting to the rest of your book – and stop you being the writer you want to be.  

So let me remind you again of the useful fact that the first sentence of your book doesn’t have to be the first one you write. In fact, it’s often pretty sensible to make it one of the last.  

And before you get to the stage where you’re finishing off your manuscript, I’d counsel you to be pretty relaxed about how you begin. 

Of course, you still have to get something down, and this can still be tricky. I understand the fear of the blank page. But again, don’t let that stop you. There are practical ways of thinking your way around this problem too – and plenty of strategies you can employ to overcome it. 

For instance: 

• Conquer the fear of that empty space and blinking cursor by just getting something down. A tried and tested way to get through inhibition is to try automatic writing. Don’t think, just write. Tell the blank page about your morning, your dreams, what you had for breakfast. Do that for a few minutes every day and see where it takes you. Get used to the idea that you can delete big chunks of writing. And also that you can surprise yourself.  Hold your bigger project somewhere at the back of your mind – but see what emerges if you just start putting down words. 

• Try starting with a scene from later on in your book. If you’ve got a scene that you’re confident will work from later in the plot, have a go at that. Learn from that about the tone and voice – and keep going from there. 

• Write yourself notes about what you want the opening to be and use those as placeholders. If sentences start forming as you’re getting those notes down, so much the better. 

• Write what you think might be the beginning – but keep remembering that it might be temporary. Be aware that you can always revise, revisit, and even delete those initial attempts.  

This last technique is the one that works best for me. For many years I wrote a weekly 1,000-word column for The Guardian. I’d do most of my research during the week and I’d sit down on a Friday morning to produce the article. Which is when the agony also began...  

I’d write and rewrite and delete and rewrite and chisel out, eventually, my first few thoughts. Hours would pass. But once I’d got that opening down, the rest would flow much more quickly. I’d write 50 words in about five hours and 950 words in less than two.  

And then, something else would generally happen. I’d go back and delete the first paragraph I’d written because I’d realise I didn’t need it after all. Or I’d go back and change it – because writing the rest of the article had revealed to me a much better way of putting things.  

 
Those initial agonies were never wasted. They would help me line things up, think about what followed, jump off into the meat of the article and say the things I really wanted to say. And so they also allowed me to come back and write an opening that actually worked.  

All of thisis a long way of saying that your opening is something you can safely worry about later. The really important first thing to do is to just start getting words down. 

If all that doesn’t settle your nervousness about beginning, let me also add something from my experience on the other side of the page. I’m an editor at a publisher. I’m the person reading those submissions. I do my best to be sympathetic. I do notice the first sentence – and I do also care about the first pages of a book. But they aren’t everything. I know the difficulties that writers have in producing them – and I know that, as a result, they rarely represent their best work. I also know that one of the most frequent editing suggestions I make is to change or cut the opening. These words aren’t set in stone. There is always another chance. You can always go back to them later. Or at least, you can so long as you get them down in the first place.  

One last thing.  

Do you think that the sentence that started this article is the first I wrote? Is there any way of knowing? Do you even care that much?  

If your answer to any of those questions is ‘no’ – and it should be – then there’s no reason for you to worry about the first thing that you write either.  

Sam Jordison is a tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. To find out more about working with Sam on your own novel over 8 or 12 months, fill in this form or visit the web page. You can also book an exploratory one-to-one with Sam to sense check your story idea before committing to the course. These helpful sessions cost just £20 and are fully refundable if you go on to study or book mentoring with us.

I’m writing this at 6.54am, hunched over a laptop beside a decaf coffee and an itemised to-do list that I can’t quite bear to look at. Did that give you an impression of me? Good, because this month’s topic is character!  

As someone who’s fascinated with psychology, character was always going to be one of my favourite topics - and let me tell you, this month's focus on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme has definitely delivered! We’ve been learning everything from building out a full, believable protagonist that readers can root for, to crafting an antagonist that has backstory and motivation (not simply a moustache-twirling bad guy who’s mean for no particular reason) to creating believable side characters who make the story feel alive. An excellent read as recommended by my tutor Holly Seddon was The Husbands by Holly Gramazio, which does a phenomenal job of economical character sketches that give big impressions with few words. Highly recommend!  

As with every topic, each person takes away something useful for their story. For me, this month has really challenged me to think about my antagonist. Creating a solid and plausible backstory which explains behaviour without implying excessive empathy is an interesting balance, to say the least! It’s making me work hard on what to reveal, how to reveal it and how to get the voice right (still working on this!) 

Now that we’re four months in, I’m noticing a definite change in my writing. I’ve previously been a chronic over-writer which tracks, since I have a tendency to overexplain things verbally (as my family will surely attest to!) Of course, I didn’t realise I was overwriting until I reached a particularly painful round of editing and ended up cutting an uncomfortable amount of my manuscript. As I’m progressing through the course and giving feedback to others, I’m learning to put a lot more trust in readers. I’m learning to leave gaps, to allow readers to draw conclusions, to hint and to sketch rather than always presenting the full picture. Of course, I’m also learning that the less you write, the more economical and clever you have to be with it. Each sentence must earn its place – a thought that’s making me much more mindful in my drafting this time round!  

The Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is also helping me become more confident in my drafting because I know that (much as I want it to) the first draft is NEVER going to be perfect. Letting go of expectations and having a play with the course tasks is allowing me to be much freer in my writing. Play, as I’ve mentioned before, is so important! It’s something I never want to lose. 

Giving and receiving feedback is becoming much easier too. I’ll admit, when I first started writing, I was terrified of feedback. Any suggested change or any hint that something wasn’t landing right totally knocked my confidence (hello imposter syndrome!). But now, I’ve become much more acclimatised to the process – a useful thing since I hope one day to have an agent and editor, both of whom will inevitably give plenty of feedback! Regular peer and tutor input on the course really gets you used to the whole thing. Having multiple people feedback on the forum is useful for spotting patterns and knowing which areas to address. Added to that, giving feedback to others is, I’m realising, one of the most effective ways to train yourself to edit your own work. I find it’s easier to determine what works for me as a reader, than editing my own work as a writer (no surprise, since I’ve been reading for much longer than I have been writing!) Applying this reader instinct to my own work is so helpful! 

Now, speaking of feedback, I can’t talk about the course without mentioning my wonderful tutor group (they aren’t paying me, promise!). As we’ve become used to reading each other’s work, we’ve also grown together as a group. They’re people I want to share my writing highs and lows with. People I’ll now message ‘just because’. When we first started, I remember Holly saying that we’ll become close and form bonds that will outlast the course – and I get it now. I can’t wait to celebrate everyone’s books as they come out into the world!  

So, my key takeaway from this month’s topic: characters need to be convincing, no matter how minor. I might even go so far as to say that flat characters make for flat stories! Even the paciest, most plot-driven story needs a character that feels 3D. 

Here’s the advice I’d give to anyone grappling with character development; pick a book you like and analyse how the protagonist / antagonist is portrayed. How quickly and effectively do we get the measure of that character? How do they make you feel? Why does it work for you? Then use the answers to have a play with your own manuscript and see what comes up! 

Until next month, happy writing all!   

Want to follow in Rachel's footsteps? You can learn more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and how it can help you on your writing journey.

Once, a long time back, I read a draft query letter from a writer who'd worked as cabin staff on a major airline and had written a book based in that world. In her query letter, she claimed that the natural market for her book was X million people, because that was how many people took a flight each year.

It would be easy to mock that kind of thinking, but I do remember (with a cringe) that my attempts to pitch my first novel in the US took an embarrassingly similar approach. Roughly, “Some of this book is set in New York, and New York is in America, so therefore...” Hmm. Well – I lived and learned.

The bigger truth is, I think, a more or less opposite one: the more intensively local you are, the more interesting you have the potential to be.

For me, the ultimate example of this is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. I happen to know Hornby’s agent and she told me that he came to her with six different pitch ideas. She hated the first five and told him so. He, downcast, said, ‘Well, you’re really not going to like my #6 option.’

She nudged him anyway, and he told her about his obsession with the Arsenal Football Club and his idea for a book about that obsession. Now the agent in question is as far from being a football fan as you can imagine. I’d be confident that she’s never watched a football match in real life, and probably never even on TV. But she loved the idea – and told him to write the book.

He wrote it. It became a huge hit in Britain. It was even a hit in the US, which was still less interested in soccerball then than it is now.

Is that surprising or not surprising?

Well, on the X-number-of-people-have-taken-flights model, the book should not have done as well as it did, certainly not in the US.

But that’s not quite the point.

First, the book was a hyper-knowledgeable novel about a niche subculture. Not just that of fandom, or of English-football-fandom, but specifically of Arsenal FC-fandom. (Which, by the way, is the best sort.) People love to gain entrance to those niche communities. That’s why JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was a hit; why Tara Westover’s Educated was.

Second, and paradoxically, the book wasn’t really about football at all – it was about obsession and addiction and the psychological toll of placing your emotions in the hands of a beast (football) which has no interest at all in your welfare.

And then third, we have this:

“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” – Hemingway

And also this:

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” - Fitzgerald

In writing, the universal arises out of the particular. Seeking to expand the audience by broadening the overt topic of your text is precisely the wrong strategy.

By diving into his ultra-niche world, Hornby ended up delivering a memoir that spoke to all those who read it. His niche story said to his readers that you are not ‘lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.’

And yes, it remains true that American readers read mostly American-authored books. But you don’t crack that problem by sitting in Daventry or Donegal and having your characters say Yee-hah as they crack open Budweisers and adjust the tilt of their Stetsons. If you do that, it’ll almost certainly feel inauthentic, unless you are exceptionally skilled. And even if it felt authentic, you still have a problem: you’re now a writer who isn’t American writing fiction that’s not meaningfully distinguishable from a zillion works by actual Americans. Why would any agent pick yours?

So, double down on what you have.

Pick your real passion – the setting you care about, the obsession that keeps you awake at night – and write about that. The smaller your egg, the bigger the chicken.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY //

The Ultimate Start Lesson Four / Tiny and big

Two FFs this week. For those of you following our much-beloved The Ultimate Start course, which this week focused on world-building, it’s:

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

When you're ready, upload your work here.

And for the rest of us, a different sort of FF.

• Find a 250-word passage that delivers something big via something tiny. The archetypal example here is Jay Gatsby dislodging a clock. The act is tiny – and only briefly mentioned – but the metaphorical reverberation lasts through the book and beyond. As ever, please give us title, genre and any explanation we need.

Share your work in this forum whenever you're ready. 

Til soon. 

Harry

The first act of a novel – the first 20,000 words, let’s say – can be hard to get right.

Your readers don’t yet care a lot about your characters – they don’t know them yet. The story situation is not yet very tangled or involved. Why does a reader need to read your book when they could be mowing the lawn or emptying a dishwasher or watching AI slop on YouTok?

And, OK, there are two basic answers to that question – and an essential prerequisite.

The prerequisite is that you have to get your readers to believe in your world: a place that feels real, characters who seem authentic. Without those things in place, there’s nothing you can do in terms of story-creation that is going to engage the reader. If the reader isn’t on board your train, it doesn’t matter how much coal you chuck into your story-furnace. The reader will still be left behind on the platform.

So, creating a real-feeling world matters. After that, there are two basic tools of story propulsion. They are:

• Creating events that are striking
• Creating questions that are adhesive.

Most writers (including probably even me) think firstest and mostest about that first bullet point. Creating story, on that view, is mostly about getting to fights or revelations or corpses or marriage proposals.

But most books don’t start with a fight. They do, nearly always, start with a question.

Who is this person? Why are they wearing that? Why have they just told a lie? What is it that sends them scurrying to the port at this dark hour of the night?

And both engines always matter.

If you’re only about fights, your book quickly starts feeling like just a succession of fists and guns. Why care? If there’s not a bigger question that looms over the action, we’ve got no big reason to give a damn.

On the other hand, questions (such as those I just listed) need, at some point, to connect with a hard-edged reality. The questions don’t need to start with the big stuff – love, death, injury, risk – but they need to pull towards it. If a book forever paddles around in the shallows, readers won’t give a damn – and they’d be right not to.

You don’t even have to get to the Big Fight quickly, you just need to make sure there are increasing hints to the reader that, oh boy, things are getting spicy. You have to build a world where the fight seems inevitable.

And the balance?

Well, look, I don’t know.

Yes, genre plays a role. The more mass-market your book, the more Events are likely to take priority over Questions. The more upmarket your book, the more Questions are likely to dominate.

But that doesn’t really seem like a helpful comment.

What I personally do is stick a few tentpoles in the ground. These are my Big Events. They’re the fights, the massive revelations, the moment of danger, the big, memorable set-piece type scenes.

I don’t necessarily need a lot of tentpoles. Two big ones is fine for a book that might run to 110,000 words. There will, I suppose, be some smaller tentpoles too, but really not very big ones. In one of my books, the two Big Tentpoles are (i) a caving trip that goes badly wrong, and (ii) a (weird) fight-to-the-death type scene at the denouement. Apart from that? Well, yes, some memorable scenes: a night alone with a corpse, a trip to see a strange man (and possible killer), meeting the grieving parents of the dead person.

But those things only just make it to the level of Big Events. Mostly, they’re just generating questions. (Why is the corpse there? Who is this man, and is he good or evil? Why do these grieving Ukrainian parents have a daughter dead in remotest Wales?)

Now, I’m probably at the skinnier end of things when it comes to tentpoles. Your book quite likely has more poles – and it’s OK if it does.

But Events and Questions?

No matter what you write or how you write it, you need both.

Always. And characters that the reader cares about.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Ultimate Start Lesson Three / Big Event tentpoles

Two FFs this week. For those of you following our much-beloved The Ultimate Start course, it’s:

• Rewrite your opening 500 words, this time really focusing on voice. Post your reflection 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?

When you're ready, upload your work here.

And for the rest of us, a different sort of FF.

How long is your book (in words)? What Big Event tentpoles do you have? What questions do you start the book with and how do those things change and enlarge as you progress? Does all this feel like it’s about the right balance?

That’s a really hard FF, by the way – so don’t worry if you get a bit of brain-ache doing it. The reward of doing it is that it should REALLY clarify your book’s journey. Your editing will get much more rigorous and attuned to what your readers’ needs really are. Good luck! When you're ready, post to the forum here.

Til soon.

Harry

I don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast rules in creative writing. As my former colleague Helen Francis often says, ‘If it works, it works.’  

The problem we face as writers, of course, is making what we want to do on the page work for our readers. So-called ‘rules’ and advice can be useful for understanding what has worked in the past for others, but the truth is you’re the only person who can write your books. Which means that the only one who can assert any ‘should’s or ‘shouldn’t’s about your writing is you.  

Here are three commonly quoted ‘rules’ that I think every writer needs to take with a pinch of salt:

1. Write what you know

Many of us begin writing by borrowing from the world(s) we know. That’s very sensible, but unless you plan on becoming a serial memoirist, you’re going to want to reach beyond your own perspective at some point. 

This advice often originates from two well-meaning intentions: 

1. To make things easier on you – writing what you know requires less research and less imagination; 

2. A fear of appropriation – it also gives you more sense of credibility and less chance of stepping on other people’s toes. 

I find this second point is the one that worries the writers I work with the most. However, I think we should be suspicious anytime we find ourselves making craft decisions based on fear.  

Another oft-quoted bit of advice I prefer is: write what you’re afraid to write. Confronting our fears on the page usually leads to much more exciting and interesting work than playing it safe.  

The truth is, writing what you don’t know is harder than writing what you do know, and it does come with risks. The greatest risk is that you’ll get things wrong and offend or upset those that know the topic/place/people/event/etc you’re writing about better than you. As with most risky things, though, the rewards when you do the work to get things right can be great too. 

What I think is essential when writing what we don’t know is to acknowledge our own positionality and understand why we’ve chosen to write about this particular topic/place/people/event/etc. Positionality refers to the social and political contexts that create our identities and the ways our backgrounds, thoughts, ideologies and biases filter how we perceive and interact with the world. Things that shape our positionality include class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality and ability status. We can’t escape our positionality when we write, and we shouldn’t want to. Whatever our stories are about and wherever they’re set, it’s our unique perspectives that shape the reader’s journey through them. However, there are things, places and especially perspectives that each of us probably can’t write well because of our positionality. That’s not a weakness, but I think we do have a responsibility to identify the limits of our positionality in order to understand where our strengths as a writer lie. 

Rather than the safe, stay-in-your-lane approach that write what you know instructs, then, I prefer to encourage the writers I work with to write to the edge of your experience. How far can you push what you know and what you can know? How can you acknowledge your positionality but also widen your perspective?

2. Show, don't tell

I’ve variously heard this clichéd rule first originated from C.S. Lewis, Anton Chekhov and even Aristotle. Whoever is responsible, I think they have a lot to answer for. While it isn’t bad advice for some parts of our work, especially for those of us working in long-form, it can never be applied throughout. 

What it usually means when someone asks us to show rather than tell is that our reader would like this part of our story to be dramatized rather than summarised.  

Scenes that are told or summarised are brief, efficient and factual. This means they require a passive reading mode and generally don’t stir our feelings as readers; we merely have to trust what the narrator says to be true. 

Fully dramatized or shown scenes, however, are slower, richer and full of sensory details, action and dialogue that require a more active reading mode. This encourages us to share in the emotions and sensations of the characters, which tends to make us feel more as we read. 

The latter is definitely more exciting to read, but the truth is we always need a bit of both. The tricky thing is knowing when to use each. 

Showing/dramatisation is best suited for: 

• scenes relevant to your character’s story arc and emotional development; 

• key turning points in the plot; 

• moments of conflict or high feeling; 

• anywhere you want your reader to truly engage with what you’re depicting. 

But telling/summary is really useful for:  

• exposition;  

• places where you want to move the story on quickly;  

• parts of the story with little emotional resonance or significance. 

3. Axe your adverbs and adjectives

In On Writing, Stephen King proclaims: ‘I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops’. Meanwhile, Mark Twain once wrote to a student, ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it.’  

Adjectives and adverbs are describing words, though, so shouldn’t it make sense to reach for them when trying to describe the settings, action and characters of our stories? In fact, aren’t they sometimes essential? It would be pretty difficult, for example, to ask a reader to picture a bespectacled old man driving a green racing car erratically along winding country roads by just saying ‘a man drove a car along roads’. 

One of the problems lies in the debunked rule above. By definition, adjectives and adverbs tell rather than show us what a thing is like or how an action is performed. So sometimes there is a better, more dynamic way to show the same thing. (In the example above, we might observe the effects of the character’s age and poor eyesight in other scenes.) Sometimes there’s not, though. (Colours, for example, often do need to be told.) 

The larger issue with adjectives and adverbs is simply quantity. In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron says: ‘Our brain can hold only about seven facts at a time. If we’re given too many details too quickly, we begin to shut down.’ So, if I tell you a wiry and spritely 90-year-old man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a hot-pink three-piece suit drove an emerald green 1951 Marauder A three-seater erratically along thickly hedged winding country roads... Well. I suspect you shut down a while ago. 

As with so many things, the key is to be selective. We need to consider:  

• which parts of a scene and setting we most want to draw the reader’s eye to; 

• which descriptions truly add to our writing; 

• that concrete adjectives (those that can be experienced through our senses – e.g. red, wide, hot, salty, loud) help a reader picture things more clearly than abstract ones (e.g. lovely, angry, ugly, fruitful, kind). 

So, trust your instincts – write your own way – and remember that some rules can, and should, be broken. 

Natasha Bell is a tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

Want to hear more about the course? Let us know and we’ll send the information you need straight to your inbox.  

You can also book a one-to-one with Natasha to chat about your book idea and road test how you’d gel with her as a mentor before applying. These sessions cost £20, and the cost is fully refundable if you go on to study with us.

Today we are joined by the internationally bestselling author Kerry Fisher to hear her insights into this tricky business of publishing, how to get your foot in the door and make it stay there. Read on for her six top tips...

Believe in yourself.

You’re going to have to back yourself long before anyone else does. That means you have to take your writing seriously because, at first, no one else will. (I’ve been published for 12 years, and people are still puzzled that I’m not free to meet up during the day because I have a book to write…) Stop waiting for the perfect moment to begin – you really don’t need a new notebook, desk or summerhouse. Give yourself a word target – two, three, five hundred words a day. Set a timer for twenty-five minutes and write without stopping to check anything. Opinions differ but, for me, a detailed plan saves a lot of time in the long run. If you’re not a plotter, at least write a list of fifteen things that have to happen in your book to give yourself a framework.

Learn to accept and listen to feedback.

It’s human nature to want to hear, ‘Work of brilliance, nothing needs doing’ but feedback doesn’t stop once you get published – if anything it increases as your editor/copyeditor will work with you to make the book the best it can be. That doesn’t mean you have to accept every comment from your mum, friend, writing group or even manuscript critique, agent or editor. But you do need to be open to listening to suggestions. Ask yourself if there’s any merit in what they’re saying. Your gut will probably recognise when a criticism is valid even if your brain is saying, NOOOOO, that’s so much work to put right!

Don’t panic if you hate your book around the 30,000-word mark.

The initial enthusiasm has worn off, the end seems a long way away, doubts start to crowd in. Write the scenes further along the line that you’re excited about and fill in the gaps later. Brainstorm with other writers. Read what you’ve written from the beginning – sometimes you’ll be surprised by how good some of it is! Make notes about what needs to change, expand or improve. Often the writing goes flat because there’s not enough conflict. What can you do to increase the stakes for your characters?

Be professional.

Be punctual, hit your deadlines, be polite, say thank you but don’t be a pushover. Opinions vary on this but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask an agent who’s requested a full manuscript for a likely timeframe for a response. If you are offered a publishing contract, try to pin down key dates for the editorial schedule up front. I’m published by Bookouture - my editor and I agree everything from first manuscript delivery to proofread dates before I write a word. It’s not pushy, it’s professional – no book is going to benefit from the stress of edits turning up out of the blue the day before you go on holiday.

Investigate digital-first publishers.

There’s nothing quite like seeing your book in on the shelves in a supermarket or bookshop – glorious feeling! But do not dismiss digital-first (ebook) publishers such as Bookouture, Boldwood, Storm, Canelo and Joffe. You can submit directly without an agent and although most don’t pay advances, the royalties are usually much higher than a traditional deal. It’s a great option if you write quickly because the time between manuscript delivery to publication tends to be much shorter than in traditional publishing. And if you do exceptionally well, some digital-first publishers will also do a print run and try to get physical copies into shops (not guaranteed for anyone, even traditionally published authors).

And finally…

The publishing world is unpredictable. The bit you can control is continuing to learn and improve your craft in order to write (and finish) the best book you can. Enter competitions. I won the best opening line competition at the Festival of Writing in 2011 for my novel, The Island Escape – ‘I was wearing the wrong bra for sitting in a police cell’. It was a boost that gave me the confidence to persevere, and also something to include in my letters to agents. Follow industry social media accounts so that you know when agents open their submissions, when publishing houses are open to direct pitches, when there’s an opportunity to get your work in front of someone who could be the yes you need.

First:

Last week I spoke these words: “I shall grow a monstrous, ‘Come on now chaps’, airman’s moustache and I shall be seen at all times to be smoking a briar pipe, even in bed.”

I spoke them, and I meant them, and I begged forgiveness for past failures.

But –

I had not quite realised the issues that would arise when I joined Briar pipe + large moustache + flammable bed clothes.

I have been forced to give up both pipe and moustache by my family. We are, for now camping in the garden, while the blaze dies down.

And –

Look, I’m quite a commercially oriented writer. I’ve written in multiple different genres (including different types of non-fiction) and I’ve always wanted to get published and get paid a decent crust for doing so. Partly, yes, that’s because I want to earn money and support my family … and to do so without having a Proper Job. (I had one of those once. Shudder.)

But also, if you’re a writer, you want readers and you’re a lot more likely to have those if you have a good publisher properly behind your book and throwing some proper spondulicks at its success.

There are plenty of self-publishers who look at these things quite analytically. They use tools like Publisher Rocket to discover the niches where buyers are most greedily buying and where authors have not yet properly caught up. They look for tropes that are popular in one genre and import them over to a neighbouring genre, in the hope of getting the same kind of success there.

And, OK. I don’t have a quarrel with anyone who writes books and sells them, but I also just don’t believe that most writers ought to take that kind of approach.

So really, my own rules for choosing a writing project are twofold.

The first is: write with your heart.

If I’m not genuinely impelled by a project, I won’t do it. (I’ve had one partial exception to that rule, when I had to write a book to fulfil a contract. The publisher wanted a book that I wasn’t keen on, but I wrote it anyway. The book was OK, ruined by bad editing, steamrollered by bad publishing, and died horribly.)

Writers are generally a little nuts, so the things we want to write about are generally a little nuts. I’ve written a (modern) police procedural about relics of King Arthur. I wrote another about medieval religious practices. I wrote a romance that stretched from the Russian Revolution to the Berlin Airlift.

And – nuts is good. You just have to love the stuff you’re writing about.

Partly that’s because you’re going to be spending a lot of time there. But also there are qualities which won’t get into your book except through love. The best books (mostly, not always) are infused with a kind of humanity and love. One of the reasons why JK Rowling has done so well is that her writing is funny and her voice is warm. Of course, kids want to read about wizards. But of course, they want to spend time with a funny, warm, loving human. You don’t get that feel from a book unless it’s written with love.

At the same time, I take plenty of care with my second rule: write for the industry.

If a book isn’t going to make any money, I won’t write it. (Again with one exception, currently not published, twenty-five years in the writing, which I wrote just because I loved doing it. I may yet seek a publisher for it.)

Mostly though, I understand what the industry wants and tamp the things that I want to write about into the kind of shape that will work for a publisher.

That sounds like a compromise, but it isn’t really. I can’t think of any time I’ve done that where the commercial pull on the book hasn’t improved it. Books get better for being propulsively readable – and what the industry calls for above all is a book that demands to be read.

And, because my moods and tastes vary, the kind of writing I’ve done has varied too. (Little teaser: I have a book in front of an agent now that’s in a totally different genre to anything I’ve written before. I’ll tell you more some other time.)

Personally, I’ve found a genre-wandering approach to a career both natural and positive. I doubt if any really good writer can only write one sort of book well. Quite the opposite: writing is writing. A good crime writer can probably write good rom-coms, or kids’ book, or a memoir.

So be free. Go where the wind blows. Write with your heart, and be ruthlessly commercial, both at the same time.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Ultimate Start Lesson Two / Why do you write?

Two FFs this week. For those of you following the Ultimate Start course, it’s:

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. 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? When your ready post to the forum here.

And for the rest of us, a different sort of FF.

Just: why do you write what you write? What drew you to your current project? Where’s the passion in it?

But also, a niggly question that I do want an answer to: would your current project be better if it was more commercial? Are there things you’re doing which you know a publisher would be likely to object to? Or are you genuinely trying to write something that you think a publisher could love?

We do often see manuscripts that are clearly passion projects, but also clearly not quite doing what a publisher would want. Is yours one? Tell me. When your ready post to the forum here.

Til soon.

Harry

It’s something which is horribly familiar to all us writers: the empty laptop screen, the blank notebook page, the grim sensation that after keeping a day free especially for writing, nothing is coming out… 

What causes writer’s block, and how do we get through it? 

Here are some tried and tested techniques. 

1. Try freewriting

This is described by psychologytoday.com as ‘a technique in which writers generate spontaneous, unstructured content’. I’d translate this as: write for the joy of it.  

Freewriting isn’t like automatic writing, where you let stream-of-consciousness prose flow from your fingertips in an unstructured tide of words. You can link freewriting to the project you’ve stalled on.  

Invent a random scene in which you choose a character and write for fun, just to see what happens. No rules, no pre-imposed structure, no tailored conclusion. It doesn’t matter if your character doesn’t yet have a role in the novel or short story you’re working on. It doesn’t matter if the scene is set in a random place you’ve selected for its novelty value. Writing for the joy of it will reconnect you with why you started all this in the first place.  

Does it work? Yes! While working on my debut novel, I had regular blockages when the story just wouldn’t come out. So, I experimented with freewriting in a series of ‘test scenes’. The characters and scenarios I chose for freewriting didn’t all make the final cut of my novel, but I had so much fun crafting a dark futuristic environment, with its gothic basement clubs and its hybrid characters, that it put me back on the rails again. A couple of pages in, and I was reminded why I love doing what I do. Eventually, I was back on track, writing scenes that did make the final cut.  

2. Reconsider your writing environment 

A study by Kaempfer & Vos (2019) revealed that if you have a familiar place and a regular habit attached to your writing, it does indeed boost creativity. The brain recognises cues indicating that it’s now time to work.  

Whether it’s a coffee at your kitchen table, or a walk in the park before you sit down to write, any routine or ritual can help. My first two novels were written and edited in children’s soft play areas surrounded by noisy kids and piped music. I look back now and don’t know how I did it, but my brain knew that my best opportunity to write was when the kids were occupied. Noisy soft play areas built themselves into my own writing ritual for several years. Now my kids are teens, that landscape has changed – and I couldn’t write in a play-zone if I tried!  

Today, I have different writing rituals: making a cup of herbal tea, taking out a specific notebook and a specific ink pen filled with bottle ink, and then sitting in peace and quiet for five minutes before opening my laptop. Making sure the cats are fed (so that I don’t get harassed) is an essential part of the ritual.  

I have a friend who does yoga on her writing mornings, and another who does a park run first. It can literally be anything which gives you a sense of routine and prepares the brain for the creative work to follow.  

3. Focus on plot  

If you hit a brick wall and feel you can’t progress, this might relate to plot. Sometimes, our creative mind knows before our conscious mind that something isn’t quite right, and it stalls us. Perhaps you need to revisit the backbone of your story.  

Take a break and think about it. Are you writing a random genre mash which instinct tells you is a bit too off-the-wall to be truly viable? Is your novel heavily influenced by film and TV, and have you realised this might not be the best way forward? Is your antagonist not powerful enough yet? Does your protagonist not yet have a proper quest? Any of these things can create a mental brick wall.  

So, what to do about it? Fortunately, there’s plenty of advice at Jericho to help you tease out these concerns and look at your project from a multitude of angles. Once you’ve recognised the problem, everything starts to make sense. Why not put your novel in a nutshell by writing a one or two sentence premise, to consolidate the core heartbeat of the story?  

4. Create a work plan  

With no work plan, writing a novel can seem like a huge task. This can lead to stalling, as you wonder where to start and how you’re ever going to conquer it.  

Minimize the overwhelm by creating a work plan. The maths suggests that a novel of 80,000 words equates to around 1,500 words a week if your goal is to finish a draft in a year. If you want to write a draft over two years, the weekly wordcount reduces to 770 words.  

A novel for younger readers (say, 50,000 words) equates to 960 words a week in a year, or 480 words a week over two years. It’s a pacing trick that works a treat because suddenly, the wordcount looks a little bit less daunting. 

5. Read!   

Take a reading break. It’s amazing how reading (or listening to) any genre of novel can bubble away in your creative subconscious and inspire you to add a new facet to your own story.  

The bonus is that for us writers, reading is a ‘working break’ rather than an excuse not to get started. Read outside your comfort zone, too. It’s amazing where this might lead in terms of ideas, word choices and prose style.  

6. Be kind to yourself  

It’s as normal for us writers to work in fits and starts as it is to write religiously for a set time every day. It’s also normal to swap between the two.  

Just because you’ve created a work schedule doesn’t mean to say you aren’t allowed to shift it around, or take time out if life gets in the way. It happens. Just know you aren’t alone.  

Happy writing!

Want more from Liz? Apply now for a place in her tutor group on the next Ultimate Novel Writing Programme intake or book a 20 minute one-to-one mentoring session with her for just £20. These are the perfect way to sense-check your story idea, ensure it’s worth investing in and road-test whether working with Liz for a longer period is right for you. If you go on to study or book more mentoring with us, the cost of this session will be credited back to you. 

Want to find out more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme or apply for the next course? Let us know and we’ll send some helpful information direct to your inbox.

First:

I’ve been thinking about my moustachelessness and my notable failures in the matter of pipe-smoking. I have resolved to do better.

I shall grow a monstrous, ‘Come on now chaps’, airman’s moustache and I shall be seen at all times to be smoking a briar pipe, even in bed.

Please forgive my earlier failures.

And –

Envy.

I’m sure we all of us sometimes read other people’s books with a kind of envy. You did that. You brought that off. You imagined that. Your sentences always sound like that.

With any really terrific text, it feels like the author wrote without effort. We know that not to be true, of course, but the feeling remains.

You’ll have your list of authors. I’ll have mine. But, enjoy them though we do, there’s also that pinprick of envy. You genius, damn you.

And –

Well, I suppose the conventional advice is that we should learn from those genii, even the pallid, feeble ones who HAVE NO MOUSTACHE. (Glowers over spectacles at Austen, Brontë, Wharton, Woolf, et al.)

And yes, so we should. In my crime writing, I’ve found Chandler and Gillian Flynn to be especially inspirational when it comes to prose style. Who says you can’t aspire to really strong, original prose, if you’re a mere crime writer? Flynn and Chandler say otherwise.

Patricia Highsmith inspires for her willingness to jump waist-deep into psychological complexity.

Stieg Larsson has an audacious scale of vision.

And Sherlock Holmes – well, he’s Holmes, right? The one, the only. That whole world of foggy streets and hansom carriages and people scattering clues with the exact colour of mud on their trousers – pure, enviable heaven.

Knowing that these things are possible makes us (I think) reach for them too. We stretch further, because they’re there.

But –

We don’t get there. I don’t write as well as either Flynn or Chandler, (though dammit, dammit, dammit – I’d like to.) My world’s not as richly knitted together as Holmes’s. There are any number of writers who do more than I can and more than I will.

But only part of the issue here is ability.

I think it also comes down to authenticity.

With every sentence we write, we have to make a choice: say it this way, or say it that way? Or say it some other way altogether?

In the end, I’m always going to choose sentences that come out of me, not ones that are simply Flynn-Chandler-Conan-Doyle pastiches.

That limits us in one way. (Flynn will always write better than me.) But it also releases the personality that readers want from a writer. If Gillian Flynn were to read some of my books, might she not think, ‘Dammit, Harry does X, Y and Z things that I don’t really do in my books. I wish I could get some of that magic juice and put it in mine.’?

Chandler’s writing is sensational – but his character lacks any complex, reflective interiority.

Highsmith’s psychology is uncompromising – but her books can get boggy and slow.

Conan Doyle is Conan Doyle – he’s the king – but no one ever said that his books were masterpieces of either prose or psychology.

So –

Envy. Yes, envy others.

And steal. Whatever you can, whenever you can. Just make it yours.

And in the end: your books will be good in your ways; their books can be good in theirs.

Twirl your moustache. Add some golden Virginian tobacco to your rosewood pipe. And write your way, without apology.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY /

We are relaunching our much-beloved The Ultimate Start course. So, for the next few weeks, we’ll focus again on the assignments there. First up:

Look at your opening 500 words and post in the forum. 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.

Because this email has had an envy & moustache theme, please feel free to add a comment on (a) which author most directly inspired the book you’re now writing and (b) which great author would look best with which sort of moustache. Me, I’d want to see Jane Austen with bushy Hungarian whiskers. Upload your work here.

Til soon.

Harry

Novels, I think, have two main engines: two primary reasons to drive the reader on through the book. Those engines are:

Propulsion. Anything that makes the reader think, ‘What’s going to happen next? This is exciting. I can’t tear myself away from this moment.’

Adhesion. Anything that makes the reader think, ‘Wow, this feels so real. It’s like I’m really there. Yes, I know I exist in the real world, but while I have this book open in front of me, its world seems more real (and more fun.)’ The adhesion stuff is what makes the book stick. It’s what makes readers think about your world when they’re on the journey to work … and months after they’ve finished the book.

So: if you want your reader to plough excitedly through the book, you need both engines burning away nicely.

All propulsion, no adhesion? Your book is full of wham, bam, action, but it doesn’t feel real, so the characters and the situations don’t really stick. Readers skate through the book and forget it (if you’re lucky) or don’t even skate through it.

All adhesion, no propulsion? Congratulations. You’ve written a work of literary fiction that people praise but very few people actually read.

So that seems like a nice tidy plan. Write your book, make sure both motors are firing up nicely – job done.

The trouble is these engines fire in more or less opposite directions. One (propulsion) is urging you to stick in more people-with-guns / love-mishaps / zombies-with-interesting-superpowers and the like. The other engine (adhesion) is asking you to slow down and describe all that stuff in enough detail that you can give it a weight and credibility that makes all the stuff feel real and present when it’s happening.

So, what to do?

Well, one of the magic solutions is one we spoke about last week. What matters to the reader isn’t really ‘how much plot-style propulsion does this book possess?’ It’s more, ‘how much propulsion exists per thousand words?’ Same sort of thing when it comes to adhesion.

So deleting surplus word count is THE technique for improving both things at the same time. It’s just about the only method that does that.

And remember: you’re not aiming to reduce the amount you express. You’re aiming to express the exact same substance, but with greater density.

One of the things to watch for here is list-making. So you may want 5 sentences to describe (say) a romantic beach-side cottage. But if you whittle that down to just 2-3, you may get the same effect … or actually greater, because readers read what you’re telling them instead of just skimming.

Another key technique is frequent switching. So instead of:

1. Gunmen (or gunwomen; I’m not fussed) burst into a room, spray bullets around, and protagonist hides behind an old oak sideboard.

Or:

2. Gunpeople burst into a room. Then a two page consideration of what they look like, the room’s furnishings, the protagonist’s past experience with gunpeople, a discussion of the weather, and then spraying bullets.

We do roughly this:

• Gunpeople burst into the room
• Protagonist’s view of what they look like, what atmosphere there is. MC’s observation is probably a sentence or two at most. They’re kinda occupied.
• First bullet is fired
• MC observation of the moment. Quick thought about what action to take.
• Another bullet or two.
• More observation.
• Attempt at evasive action behind sideboard, tuned in with earlier thought process.
• Success / failure of evasion. More reflection / thought / MC-centric text. Back to more action

In effect, you’re constantly offering action and making sense of it via your protagonist.

Are there genres where this doesn’t matter? Yep, maybe. I’ve just read a chunk of my daughter’s Rick Riordan book (Heroes of Olympus / House of Hades), and it seemed all propulsion and so little attempt at adhesion, it wasn’t even clear to me who the MC was supposed to be.

But most books, most of the time? You need both engines firing. Or, to be more accurate, that’s true of all books, all of the time – just you need to strike a different balance depending on genre and audience.

That is it from me. I have no moustache and I do not smoke a pipe.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Action and reflection

Let’s see a 250-300 word chunk of text with nice flip-flop between action and reflection. If your passage has lots of dialogue in it, then check that the dialogue flip-flops in the same way. (‘Get out of here! That thing’s about to explode!’ vs ‘This reminds me of when …’)

As ever, let’s have title, genre and any context we need to make sense of things. When you're ready, upload your work here.

Til soon. 

Harry

On 2 July this year, my debut novel The Summer We Lied will be released into the world. Less than a month before that, I turned fifty. Fifty!? What on earth have I been doing with my time, you may well ask.  

I often wonder that myself when I see all the wonderful young writers out there, working full time and wrestling small children to and from school or nursery, yet still somehow managing to polish a manuscript worthy enough of publication.  

But what I’ve realised, over the last five years, is that we all come to writing on our own terms. For some of us that may be straight out of school or university. For others – like me – it might just take that little bit longer, and require a little more help.  

In 2021, after moving house and postcode, I took a break from teaching to try and finally do what I’d always said I wanted to do: write a book. By that stage, I had several notebooks full of ideas, a drawer full of half-finished manuscripts, but nothing I’d ever seen through to completion. Work got in the way, or having a child got in the way, or divorce got in the way. Life, in general, provided a plethora of excuses and reasons as to why I couldn’t just sit down and write a book. In reality, the only thing holding me back was myself.  

With no more excuses to be found, I sat down, got to work, and within a year had finished a manuscript that was perhaps less a novel than it was a jumble of ideas and genres. I’d proved to myself I could write 100,000 words, but I definitely needed help to take it to the next stage.  

Then, at the end of 2022, I had an idea for a new novel that really excited me. It fit the kind of genre of books I liked to read (crime thriller) and also felt cinematic in its sprawl. I had the characters, the stepping stones of a plot, but still no real clue how to hang it all together.  

After searching online for some available courses, I found the Jericho Writers website and applied for a place on their Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. I was thrilled to be accepted onto the 2023 Spring/Summer course and put everything I could into getting the most out of the amazing resources available. Over the months that followed - with feedback from my brilliant tutor, Holly Seddon, along with an equally fabulous peer group of fellow writers - I finished a manuscript that I felt confident enough to send out on submission. 

Back at the start of my writing journey, I’d attended an online event led by Juliet Mushens at Mushens Entertainment, which was hugely insightful. Juliet seemed genuinely passionate about her role as an agent, and I decided to send the opening of my completed novel to her first, just to test the water.   

Remarkably, Juliet requested my full manuscript and, after a couple of weeks of discussions about how better to structure the novel, signed me as a client. I couldn’t have been more thrilled, but the work only increased from there. It took three or four more iterations to get the story right; restructuring and reshaping, rewriting and editing. All the way through this period, I had Holly at the end of an email offering advice and cheering me on, and I had my UNWP fellow writers on WhatsApp and Zooms keeping me sane.

It took months, but by the June of 2025 it was ready to be sent out to Juliet’s list of editors. ‘Gird your loins,’ she told me. ‘This bit can be painful.’ I duly girded . . . then came the email: Alison Hennessey, at Bloomsbury’s Raven Books was taking it to acquisitions! 

The first person I texted was Holly – I knew she’d be just as thrilled as I was, and would also be there to offer me a steadying word if needed – then I texted my UNWP WhatsApp group to share the news: Shhh, don’t tell anyone - a two-book deal! An absolute dream, and I signed without any hesitation. 

Just as before, the work didn’t stop there. More edits, and a full year later, the finished, physical book is now in my hands at last.  

It feels both incredible and terrifying, when finally it happens. But I like to hope that - even at fifty - I’m just getting started. 

My top tips for aspiring authors

1. Embrace feedback

Get as much feedback on your ideas and writing as possible, whether online or in person. I’ve found everyone at Jericho Writers to be incredibly generous with their time and thoughtful in their responses. We are all learners in the beginning and finding a group to inspire and cheer you on can make all the difference. I couldn’t be without my UNWP alumni group and we still Zoom almost every month. 

2. Brace yourself for rejection - but see it as useful, too

Be prepared for rejection but also be ready to learn from it. If you get constructive feedback from agents who seem to be picking up the same issues or suggesting similar solutions, be open to their suggestions. Rewriting and revising your manuscript is all part of the process and if you’re rigid in your thinking, you maybe limiting your story’s potential without realising.  

3. Keep on keeping on

Don’t stop at the first hurdle. I know everyone says that feedback is subjective but it’s true! You only need one yes for the project to begin its journey. 

4. There's no such thing as 'too late'

Finally, remember there is no age limit on creativity. However old you are when you come to writing, or whatever your situation, all you can do is try. Even the humblest, messiest first draft has potential if you are willing to keep working at it.  

A law graduate and English teacher for almost twenty years, Rebecca Hardy is is currently taking a career break to pursue her love of writing. She lives in East Sussex, with her wife and teenage son, in amongst the fields and hills where her novel begins. A place which is, thankfully, far more tranquil in real life than on the page. Rebecca is a graduate of the Jericho Writers Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, and her novel The Summer We Lied releases on 2 July.

Want to find out more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme or apply for the next course? Let us know and we'll send some helpful information direct to your inbox.

Every year, the London Festival of Writing leaves us with that unmistakable post‑Festival glow — the kind that makes you want to write more and read more. So, in true Jericho fashion, we asked some of the team to share one small moment from the weekend that stuck with them. The brief was simple: one thing you learned, were reminded of, or will carry into your own writing practice.

And the results? Pure gold. From the electric buzz of community, to the joy of seeing writers cheer each other on, to those rare moments that remind us exactly why stories matter...we think the team captured the heart of the Festival perfectly!

Below, you’ll find their reflections and a little post-Festival warmth to keep you going until next year. If reading these gives you the urge to join us in 2027, you can always sign up for Festival updates or dive deeper into the community with Premium Membership.

Now, onto the good stuff…

Sophie Flynn

At this year's London Festival of Writing, I saw first-hand just how much excitement there still is from agents about discovering new writers.

It’s easy, especially when you’re deep in the querying trenches, to start seeing agents as gatekeepers, or to feel worn down by form rejections and silence. But spending the weekend surrounded by agents and publishers was such a good reminder that they actually just real people who genuinely love books and are actively looking for brilliant new talent.

On Saturday night, I watched a fantastic agent literally sprint across the hall to catch one of our Friday Night Live finalists before they left, because the agent didn’t want to miss the chance to speak to them. A dream scenario for any writer!

As writers, it’s so easy to focus on the rejections that we forget this: agents want to fall in love with your work. They’re hoping for that feeling just as much as you are. Some of them will even abandon their prosecco to sprint across a hall to tell you.

Becca Day

The main thing that really struck me this year was how valuable people found the lunch and tea & coffee breaks. When we’re planning the festival we’re often wrapped up in thinking about which authors we should invite to speak and which agents we want to be offering one-to-ones, which of course is all super important, but it’s often easy to miss what having breaks between all that excitement provides: the opportunity to chat with other writers. That’s the big difference between the London Festival of Writing and a weekend of online workshops. While the latter is still brilliant for learning, it lacks that face to fact interaction. I’ll never grow tired of seeing friendships form over coffee and pastries.

Rachel Davidson

Always a big highlight of my year. It's enormous fun, full of energy, enthusiasm and a particular shared excitement that bringing so many writers together in one place evokes. I invariably end the weekend exhausted, but it's the satisfying kind from doing something worthwhile - days spent beneath a benevolent sun, tending important crops and preparing a good harvest kind!

Everywhere I looked there were conversations, laughter, encouragement and smiles. Writers arriving hoping to learn, improve and make connections, and leaving having done all three. It's an opportunity to meet many of my writing friends in person rather than through our emails, Zoom squares and Townhouse forums. Every year it is confirmed that writers are some of the most generous, thoughtful and interesting people you could hope to meet. I'm already looking forward to the next one."

Imogen Love

Every year at the Festival of Writing, I like to think that our community proves why writing should never only be a solitary pursuit. Although writing will always involve a lot of time in front of the computer, we see how the insight and support received from being around other writers really is invaluable. I'm always aware that for many attendees, this will be the one weekend a year where they can devote their entire waking hours to being a writer, and I hope all take away that buzz of creativity, understanding, and community. I like seeing attendees gain the courage to put their hand up in a workshop and share something about their own writing practice that resonates with others, finally finding other people that 'get' their experiences as a writer. But my favourite moment is always Friday Night Live, where the finalists and shortlisted writers get wholehearted support and encouragement, and writers celebrate each other. It’s a reminder that generously swapping ideas, experiences, and learnings makes us all better writers!

Emily Mitchell

One thing I was reminded of at the London Festival of Writing was the sheer support and atmosphere that comes from a good writing community. Conversations were buzzing and new friendships made throughout the weekend. It is such a lovely thing for us to witness as people return with the friends they made in previous years and continue to expand their circle. Community is critical, especially when it comes to writing, where the industry can be quite quiet and isolating at times. As always, my highlight of the festival was the Friday Night Live competition. It's amazing to hear the finalists read their work live and they were so brave to share their work. I need all six of them to be published so I can find out what happens next. The gasp in the room at Denny's reveal in the extract was exquisite and the type of moment that reminds you how electrifying stories can be. However, what I most love about FNL is how supportive the entire room is of these writer's work and how much everyone is cheering one another on. It is a wonderful environment and always feels so special.

Tanya Lewis

One thing that really struck me at this year’s London Festival of Writing was how grounding it is to meet the people behind the industry. The agents, the authors, the publishers— and realise they’re not distant figures at all. They’re real humans with stories, nerves, excitement, and the same love of books that brought all of us into the room in the first place.

Across the weekend, I found myself chatting to agents who were excited about discovering new voices, and authors who spoke openly about their own messy drafts, long waits, and unexpected breakthroughs. Hearing those stories (the honest, unpolished versions) was such a powerful reminder that no one in this industry is gliding effortlessly from success to success. Everyone starts from somewhere.

It made the whole writing world feel kinder and far more accessible. And I left feeling reassured that the people we sometimes imagine as gatekeepers are, in reality, fellow book‑lovers rooting for writers and stories just like yours.

Laura Starkey

There were a couple of highlights for me this year. First, it was such a privilege - and a real buzz! - to see how far last year's Friday Night Live winner Kate Emilie has come in just 12 months. From competition winner to agented author with book deals in multiple countries, she's travelled such a distance in a single year: proof that believing in yourself, and pushing onwards with your dream, really can pay off. You never know whether the next competition you enter will be the one you win, whether the next agent you query will be the one who picks you up, or whether the next publisher you submit to will jump at the chance to sign you. It's a cliche, but it only takes one 'yes' to kickstart a career.

As always, the atmosphere at this year's festival was fantastically positive, too. I love that LFOW is an inclusive event where there's joy and camaraderie  to be found at any age, whatever your chosen genre and regardless of where you come from. What an amazing thing it is - and what an honour - that writers travel from as far afield as Australia, New Zealand and the United States to be with us each year! The Festival is always a brilliant opportunity to connect, and reconnect, with other people who love stories as much as you do. This year, I was lucky enough to see an old university friend there after we lost touch twenty years ago. How's that for a plot twist? 

This month’s learning is all about setting. It was real mindset shift when, on the Lead Tutor call this week, we were told that setting is not just about place – it's time too. And it’s not just about place and time, it’s all the other stuff like culture, traditions, politics, norms (the list goes on). This seems like a logical point when you spell it out, but I don’t know that I’d been thinking of it this way (especially when coming up with ideas, as I’m a plot-first kind of writer). Prior to the course, I’d been writing speculative and fantasy stories which, by nature, require a lot of consideration for world building. But now that I’m writing a psychological thriller set in our world, I thought the setting side of things would need less attention. Not so! 

Working through our weekly tasks, I’ve realised that while I’m making some use of my coastal setting, I’m not yet pushing it to its full potential. Is it atmospheric? Yes – I like to think so. Is my character a product of the setting? Yes, but I have some work to do on bringing this to the fore. Is the setting serving the story as effectively as it could? Not yet. It’s here that I need to knuckle down and lean into to what should be a really evocative setting. I mean, it’s got the SEA, right? One of the most powerful, expansive natural forces on earth. I’d be silly not to use it.  

This week during our tutor group workshop, we gave live feedback on each other’s works in progress. While we’ve done this on the forum (in writing), it’s the first time we’ve read our work aloud and received feedback ‘in the moment’. This is the sort of thing that would usually fill me with nerves and while I definitely stumbled over words when reading aloud (even though it was my own writing), I didn’t mind! Everyone in the group is so supportive – it feels like a safe space to get honest and constructive input. It’s such a boost to hear other writers enjoying your work and so useful when they spot things that you haven’t. I also love hearing everyone else’s excerpts – not just because they’re interesting stories, but because we all approach description differently and that’s what makes reading so enjoyable! 

So, not a part of the course exactly, but I was very fortunate to attend Jericho's London Festival of Writing last weekend (honestly probably my favourite writing event ever!). What was especially fun was meeting members of my tutor group in person and chatting with other course students and alumni. It’s such a lovely and supportive community and I’m so grateful to be a part of it. There’s just that instant understanding when you meet other writers. They get it.  

This week, I’ve had my second round of feedback from my tutor, Holly. I mentioned in the previous month about a ‘whacky’ idea I’d had and how without Holly’s encouragement, I’d have been too afraid to implement it. Well, I tried it out and the feedback was great (hurray!). It’s really boosted my confidence to take risks and play with the manuscript more. I love twisty and surprising stories, so why can’t I have a go at writing one? Turns out – I can! I wouldn’t have done this without Holly’s guidance.  

So, my key takeaway from this month... 

Use setting purposefully. Settings should serve the story and there are a whole host of ways they can do this; creating obstacles for the character, developing tension, reflecting mood etc. If like me, you have a tendency to focus on plot and let setting fall by the wayside – this is your call to action. Think about how you can make setting work best for you and be specific in it. We’re not talking reams of exposition but targeted, choice references that ground the reader and build trust. And, most importantly, have some fun with it and don’t be afraid to take a risk! 

Want to follow in Rachel's footsteps? You can learn more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and how it can help you on your writing journey.

Apply before 30 June 2026 to save 10% off our Winter 26/27 course (up to £603 / $774 USD!). Just enter code EARLY10 when you apply to secure your discount.

Summer 2023 feels like a lifetime ago. In fact, very few things about my life remain the same from that period. I no longer live on a canal boat, or in the same part of the country. I'm in a different relationship, and I'm now a mother. The one constant is that I am still a writer, and the extract I nervously read live at Jericho Writers' 2023 Friday Night Live is now printed in hardback, about to be released as a lead title for Bantam, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Looking back, the extract I read that night was far, far from its finished form. But sharing my work publicly, and winning the competition, gave me the confidence to keep going. The prize — a manuscript review, which I chose to have with the brilliant Debi Alper — gave me vital guidance on how to strengthen the novel before I started querying agents. Debi's notes were both validating and constructively critical, and once I'd put them into action, I felt confident that I'd done the best I could before I hit send. I know having the FNL win listed in my covering letter helped catch agents' attention. It signalled that other people believed in the work, and that I was prepared to put myself out there as a writer, even before I had the stamp of approval from the industry.

I was thrilled to sign with Megan Staunton at Bergstrom Studios, who sifted my query from the slush pile and replied with such enthusiasm that I knew she'd be the perfect champion for the story I wanted to tell. After another round of edits and changing the novel's title from Emotional Transport to The Carrier (thank you Megan!) we went out on submission. The wait was excruciating. There were months of silence, a string of enthusiastic-but-no thank you passes, and then, finally, an offer from Thorne Ryan, Deputy Publishing Director at Bantam Books. I was six months pregnant at the time, taking Megan's call while looking around a prospective rental flat with my now-husband. The estate agent looked a little perturbed when he saw me crying on the phone in the garden, but was patient enough to let me gather my thoughts and relay the information to my husband, before we politely declined the lease. The offer felt like a dream, but one that came with a note of caution, Thorne was clear that while she loved the premise, there was significant work to do to ensure the novel fitted firmly in the thriller genre. I was more than happy to do this, viewing it as another opportunity to learn from someone far more experienced than me, but I was also nervous about the practicalities. I had three months before my baby arrived and was still working full time. I didn't know how I'd feel after giving birth, or if I'd have the headspace to write with a newborn baby.

We managed to complete a structural edit before my son was born, and then another pass after his arrival — possibly more than one, the postpartum period is a little hazy in my memory. Eventually The Carrier was ready to go to copy edit, and the marketing and publicity team got to work planning the launch.

Now accurately packaged as a feminist thriller, The Carrier imagines a society where, if you're wealthy enough, you can pay to outsource unwanted emotions to an underclass of women known as the Carriers. It's been strange to watch something that began as a daydream on a long drive, morph into something with a team behind it. It takes so many people to release a book into the world, from the editors, to the proof readers, the cover designers, sales teams, publicists and printers. There is so much that happens behind the scenes to get a book onto the shelves, and I still find it hard to believe mine is one of them. Described by Pandora Sykes as "timely and fantastically compelling," The Carrier is currently making its way into readers' hands and I'm so excited, and a little anxious, to see how it will be received.

If there's one thing this whole journey has taught me, it's that the path to publication is long and winding. There are potholes and detours, and it can be tempting to give up. Opportunities like Friday Night Live helped keep me on track. Even if I hadn't been shortlisted, or won the prize, entering still gave me something to aim for and a milestone I could celebrate along the way. And that probably is the best advice that I could give anyone currently wrestling with a first draft or waiting to hear back from agents or editors. Celebrate all the wins along the way, because if you wait until your book is on the shelf, you're going to be waiting a very long time. Finishing a draft is worthy of celebration, as is hearing from an agent, or being longlisted for a prize. Even abandoning a novel that doesn't quite work deserves acknowledgement, you still put time and energy into creating something from nothing.  In a world full of distractions that are goading you to consume, giving your attention to writing and creativity is a brilliant and quietly radical thing to do. So keep going.

The Carrier is out on July 2nd, with Bantam. You can preorder it now. 

The phrase ‘kill your darlings’ originated with a British writer, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who said, in 1916:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

That phrase was picked out and adjusted by the worse-named but more famous William Faulkner who said,

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

Now, a few observations to start with:

1. Why did all British writers of a certain generation have names like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - and why on earth was I not issued with one of them?

2. The phrase does seem to be a particularly bloodthirsty one to use when your country is right in the middle of the bloodiest way it’s ever fought. Maybe chill a little, dude?

3. Faulkner’s version of the phrase is better than Q-C’s. The one-syllable click of ‘kill’ works better than ‘murder’ when laid against the two-syllable ‘darlings’. Maybe that explains why WF is more famous even though he’s got an obviously worse name.

4. While we’re on the topic of names, I feel obliged to point out that Sir Arthur Q-C also had a better moustache than WF, although both men put in a jolly decent effort. Well done to both. I’d say the two men were evenly matched in the matter of pipe-smoking.

But here’s a bigger observation:

5. The phrase is bullshit, no? I mean it’s  fur-lined, ocean-going, gold-plated, 36-carat, spit-and-polish nonsense. 

I never kill my darlings. I look after them.

This is my policy as a proud family man. (Number of children born: 4. Number of children so far slaughtered: 0.)

But it’s also my policy as a writer. If you write a great scene, keep it. If you have a good joke, retain it. If you nail a descriptive sentence, hang on to it.

Yes, a lot of deletion will happen in your work. And the more inexperienced you are, the greater the ratio of deletion to final output. But killing darlings is not really the way to do it.

In practice, I think there are two or three real guidelines that apply when it comes to deleting your material.

1. Compact is always better

It’s pretty much inevitable that if your first draft just spins productively off your pen, that plenty of what you’ve written can be made more compact. Sometimes, that’ll be a 12 word sentence that you can turn into a 9 word sentence (that says the exact same thing.) Other times, there’ll be a para that can lose a sentence. Or a chapter ending that offers a page of farewell, when really a single paragraph will do.

There are inevitably opportunities like this throughout your text and you should take them all. Perhaps the single most dependable, most surprising, most effective editing tool at your disposal is simply deleting the unnecessary. It still astonishes me quite how much deleting text can improve a manuscript. Everything gets better. A dull chapter becomes a good one. A soggy book becomes a propulsive one.

2. Delete more than you think

This is especially true for newer writers. I’d say most manuscripts that come through our doors for editing are at least 20% too long. 30% is perfectly common. And even if your manuscript is only 10% too long, that could easily mean that you have 10,000 words that really don’t want to be there.

Set your sights high when it comes to eliminating surplus. And bear in mind that the goal here is mostly to eliminate word count whilst communicating exactly the same thing as you did before. You want the same narrative power, but delivered with fewer words.

3. Some of your text will have been direction-finding

When you’re writing your first draft, a lot of what you do will have been effectively probing around on a misty mountain at night, searching for the right path forward.

That’s fine. We’re not issued with a very precise map at the start of writing, and even if we have pre-planned everything to the last detail, those plans may need amendment.

So your way – my way, anyone’s way – to resolve that uncertainty is just to write. We throw in a bit of this, a bit of that, see what sticks. When we find the way forward, we take it. That’s absolutely the right policy.

But when you come back to your manuscript, you need to find the bits of it which were just casting about for direction.

With those bits, you mustn’t think, “Hmm, how can I make this more compact?” You need to think, “Yeah, I just don’t need any of this, do I?”

It’s never as simple as just Select-Delete. There are always dabs of crucial information that you need to replant somewhere. There are joins to smooth. Character insights to adjust.

But roughly: direction-finding text will be baggy and useless. Your aim is to knock down the whole unnecessary structure, then do what you need to do to make good afterwards.

But killing darlings?

Nope. I don’t do that in my family. And I don’t do that with my text. I rather suggest that you wax your moustache, fill your pipe – and love your darlings.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Delete, delete, delete

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

Plot Your Romance Novel video course task: Write a final 400-word pitch for the romance novel you would like to write. Your pitch should include: The type of romance (sub-genre), the central premise of the story, the key trope or tropes, the spice level and your reader promise. When you're ready, post your work in the forum.

General task: Find a 300 word passage in your text and cut it down. Your aim is to have the text say, essentially, the same thing as it said before, but with fewer words. I'm not going to be impressed unless you cut at least 30 words, and really, you're going to try for 50+. When you're ready, upload your work here.

Til soon. 

Harry

I like to think that, during my forty-ish years on this planet, I’ve picked up some pretty useful lessons for living.  

• Telling someone you love them is almost always a good idea, so long as you mean it 

• Life holds few pleasures more perfect than nice cup of tea + sit down + good book 

• Cheap bin liners are an utterly false economy.  

Five books into what I hope will be a long and happy writing career, I’ve acquired a few author-specific insights, too.  

I’m still learning all the time – but here are the most useful pointers I’ve gleaned thus far…  

1. Writing is hard 

The crafting of a novel is difficult. It’s a feat of creativity, but also of strategic planning, discipline and determination. At some point during the drafting of every book, I experience a crisis of confidence so profound it leaves me crying into my keyboard.   

The task seems harder still when you consider it in the context of real life, where many of us have day jobs, children or other dependents, and homes to run.  

But as Miley Cyrus famously said, ‘It’s the climb’ – and since when has anything worth doing been easy? I’ll probably always have days when I’m reduced to weeping at my desk. I’ve just learned to see them as part of the process: signs that I’m Doing The Work, and that it matters to me. 

2. Writing is joyful 

Consider the rush of crafting a conversation between two people who sound and feel real, even though, five minutes ago, they only existed in your head.  

Remember the kick of satisfaction that comes with making yourself laugh, or sending a shiver down your own spine, as you type.  

Think of those moments when you’ve hit upon precisely the right words to describe an emotion – a sentence that you know, in your bones, rings true.  

They are your reward for the times when everything seems wrong, and you feel like giving up.  

They are beautiful and you must savour them. 

3. The book in your head will never exist in real life 

Don’t ask me why – but something happens when you try to extract your lovely, shiny book idea from your brain and commit it to the page.  

Maybe it’s that character sketches and plot points are stress-tested when they’re stretched over thousands of words. Perhaps it’s a strange kind of alchemy: the base metal of your book turning into gold, even if it doesn’t feel that way as you work on it.  

Anyway, I’ve found stories rarely take the shape you initially expected when you actually start writing them. I have come to accept this. 

4. Publishing is not a meritocracy… and luck does a lot of heavy lifting 

The most talented authors are not always the ones who get the best deals or sell the most books. The vagaries of the market are too mad to make sense of, and the entire business is subjective. One editor’s trash is another’s treasure – particularly if it seems likely to blow up on BookTok. 

In my experience, it’s liberating to accept that some proportion of the success you find (or keep striving for) will always be down to luck: your book finding its way to the right people at the right time.  

Sidebar: I cannot stress enough how pointless it is to resent someone else’s achievements or feel bitter that yours don’t match up. Comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s also a total waste of time. Time you could be spending on honing your craft or pushing your own project forward.  

5. Fashion fades, style is eternal 

On a similar note, I think writing to fit in with a prevailing trend is risky – unless, of course, you’ve been commissioned to do so by a publisher and paid a tasty advance.  

As Yves Saint Laurent supposedly said: ‘Fashion fades, style is eternal.’ What’s selling today might seem old hat by the time you’ve got a full manuscript together - but a great story, beautifully written in your unique voice, will always have its place.  

Last week I took a Great Icon of English literature and trashed his cliffhanger chapter ending. And I think I was right enough about the badness of his endings, but I also realise that I didn’t actually offer much about what good endings actually look like.

So, today we investigate that.

I’m going to look at chapter endings from Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, a book aimed at roughly 10-12 year old readers, but which also sold plenty to adults too. The book won a ton of prizes and sold lots of copies, so it’s a pretty fair place to look for inspiration.

I’m going to put chapter ending techniques in different buckets, and we’ll see which bucket fills up fastest. The book starts out with two characters (Mal and Christopher) and I’ll label chapters accordingly.

Here goes.

Prologue (Mal)

“ … when there was a knock on the door.

It was the murderer.”

That IS kind of a cliffhanger-y chapter ending, but the chapter doesn’t finish in the middle of the action (Hardy-style). Instead, it closes on the cusp of something dramatic that's about to happen. 

Also, this is really a prologue – it’s only a page long – so it plays by different rules.

Bucket: Cusp of drama

Chapter 2 (Mal)

“But they were busy, and people mostly let her be, to run and eat and fly.

Except, that day, for the murderer.”

This just picks up the exact same tune as the prologue. If we’re being honest, that tune has only very recently been played and it’s a bit weak to revert to it quite so soon. But? OK, I’ve done things like that myself. It is a compromise, but not an especially grievous one.

But the prologue was ‘cusp of drama’, because there was an actual knock at the door. Here, no action is on the point of being launched, so this is a promise of action but (because of the ‘that day’) with the status set to imminent.

Bucket: Promise of action (imminent)

Chapter 3 (Christopher)

“The way grew steeper, and the earth darker, a peaty black dotted with gorse. The air began to smell different – richer, and deeper, and wilder.”

This is an interesting one. You can’t really say that this foreshadows future action, because there’s not even a whiff of what any action might be. What there is here, however, is a sense of change, and a hint as to what that change is going to be.

It’s going to be richer, deeper and wilder, of course. But it’s also going to be steeper / darker / blacker. That is, it’s going to be tough and dangerous. This is good writing, for sure, because a perfectly normal comment about the changing landscape is interpreted – correctly – as a comment about the boy’s future.

Bucket: Foreshadowing change (non-specific)

Chapter 4 (Mal)

“She flew there, 23 feet up in the sky, the wind buoying her, her feet pointed behind.

She did not see that the murderer watched her go."

This is now the third Mal chapter in a row that uses the exact same device – the exact same word – to propel reading. Honestly? I think it grates now. I’d have been happier with an ending along the lines of “She was confident that she’d escaped. Perhaps now, things could return to normal.” Any reader would interpret that as “Of course she hasn’t b****y well escaped, you idiot...”

But in terms of chapter ending style, we’re still in the same place as for the last one.

Bucket: Promise of action (imminent)

Chapter 5 (Christopher)

“’You're welcome here: you're my grandson, and it's right that you should come. But don't forget what I said [regarding a forbidden pond].’

He left. He didn't notice – for even the wisest of the old forget, sometimes, the care and subtlety of the young – that Christopher had made no promise [again, in relation to the pond].”

This, by contrast, seems like a pretty much perfect chapter ending. The author is effectively promising that her character is about to do something that he shouldn't do.

We don't at this stage know what the consequences of that transgression will be, so we can’t quite bracket this as a promise of action. All we really know is that whatever Christopher does is going to alter things in an exciting way. So our verdict is …

Bucket: Promising change (non-specific)

Chapter 6 (Mal)

“She had thought about writing to them, to tell them what she knew, but had decided not to. She could not bear to risk him [her griffin, the last one left alive] being taken.

She shivered, hard. She tucked her hair into her navy fisherman's jersey, and prepared to fly home.”

This chapter ending seems to me a little inert. And, OK, a great book can cope perfectly well with a few rather flat chapter endings, so I don’t want to make too much of this criticism. But the ending actually flattens any change, rather than creating it. The ending has a feeling of “OK, so we’re done here” to it, without undermining that statement, even metaphorically.

Bucket: Flat ending; no promise of change

Thoughts on all the above

What’s interesting to me here is that the best endings, to my taste, were the Christopher ones. They revolved around foreshadowing change / promising future action (not imminent).

The Mal chapter endings seemed either too flat (the last one) or too constantly dramatic (all the murderer-based ones). When I look at my own chapter endings, they tend to cluster very much in Christopher type territory: foreshadowing change / promising future action (not imminent).

That’s not at all saying that cusp of action endings don’t work – they certainly do, but they are the raisins in the pudding. They’re not the pudding.

Perhaps all this is just a matter of personal taste, but I really don’t think it is. I think that gives us a sense of what good chapters endings generally feel like. Join us over on Townhouse, if you can, and jump into this week’s Feedback Friday discussion. I think it’ll be very illuminating!

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Chapter endings

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

Plot Your Romance Novel video course task: Write one or two sentences about how you plan to combine or subvert common romance tropes. Share this in the forum.

General task: Give us two or three of your chapter endings, just as I’ve done in this email. Share your reflections on whether they work and what you think they’re doing - and as always, please provide your book's title and genre. When you're ready, upload your work here.

Til soon. 

Harry

The first time I attended the Jericho Writers Festival of Writing, over ten years ago, I felt out of my depth. I’d written a novel that I thought was decent, and I’d be pitching it to agents that weekend. I didn’t know it then, but I still had a long way to go on my writing journey.

I have so many memories of that festival weekend – meeting other writers, speaking to agents, attending workshops. But what sticks in my mind most was an event called ‘Slushpile Live’, led by Harry Bingham, in which writers could hand in their cover letter, synopsis, and opening pages, and receive live feedback from agents in front of the whole room.

I was too nervous to hand in mine. We went around the room, hearing lots of useful feedback about people’s submissions. Mine was sitting on the desk in front of me.

‘I think we’ve got time for one more,’ Harry said.

But I still didn’t put my hand up.

I didn’t think my heart could take it. The feedback was all constructive, but tough to hear. None of the submissions were ready. It was clear that getting published would be even more difficult than I thought.

Still, I wished I’d put my hand up.

Harry and the agents gave feedback on the final submission.

Harry checked the clock again. ‘Alright, one more,’ he said.

My hand shot up. Harry took my pages. This was the first time anyone had ever seen my work, beyond family and friends. I was ready to run out of the room, to give up on this whole writing thing.

Harry read the opening paragraphs aloud. He paused.

‘That’s pretty good,’ he said. And he proceeded to dissect specifically what he liked about it, what I’d done well, and why it might entice an agent (and readers).

That moment will always stay with me. Because I knew I had something. Even if this novel never got published (and it won’t be), I knew I was on my way. That festival gave me the confidence to keep going, and a direction to get me there.

Over the following years, I used Jericho Writers for finding agents, for submission feedback, for agent one-to-ones. I attended more festivals. I was shortlisted for Friday Night live (the Festival's writing competition on the opening 500 words) and read my work in front of the entire festival. I was shortlisted for Best Opening Chapter, and more recently, Pitch Jericho. Each of these achievements felt like a little landmark – a sign that I was onto something, and that my dream of being published might come true eventually, if I just stuck with it.

I did stick with it. And in 2024 I was lucky enough to win an international writing competition, secure myself a wonderful agent and now I’m being published in multiple countries, with another book on the way.

My biggest piece of advice, which might seem unconventional, is to enter competitions. Of course it’s easy for me to say that – if I hadn’t won the Bath Novel Award, I might not have found my agent. But I also found an agent when I was shortlisted for Best 500 Words (for a novel which was ultimately never published). Always send your work to agents, but competitions are where I’ve found the most joy. Even if you don’t win, you might get longlisted or shortlisted, and you might receive feedback, which is huge for any aspiring writer.

Of course, I still had to put in the work. I had to write several failed novels, read lots of books about writing, and send my novels out in spite of the countless rejections. But by the time I wrote this latest novel, I felt like I knew (for the most part) what I was doing. I felt like I understood stories, and characters, and all the things we love about literature.

For anyone looking to write great stories and become a published author, you need two main things – to write a great book, and to pitch it well. Both of these are much easier said than done. It can often feel like you’re wandering alone through a long dark tunnel.

What Jericho gave me was a torch, a path, and a ray of light at the end.

The term cliffhanger derives from a famous scene in a Thomas Hardy novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Now, I should probably say upfront that I think the novel is bad, the scene in question is worse, and that Hardy himself is monstrously overrated as a writer. If those thoughts mark me down as a Literary Infidel, then by all means print off this email, so you can tear it to shreds with your teeth, and shriek around your local shopping centre denouncing me and mine to everyone you meet. [Statutory warning: actually doing this may cause you some difficulty with your local mental health services. You do it at your own risk.]

Here’s what happens. (Because Hardy is extremely verbose, I’ve edited sharply to stop your eyes boiling in your head.) The hero is Mr Knight, and he’s at the tippy-top edge of a cliff, along with the lovely (but really quite useless) Elfride.

By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to [Knight’s] own weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his feet depended …

It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.

The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than useless now. It rolled over, out of sight …

One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight began to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride uttered a low wild wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her face with her hands.

Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face yet steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of vegetation--the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his arms.

You’d think that Elfride’s job was now rather obvious: help her buddy from an obvious death. But she’s useless and Knight isn’t much better. Here’s Hardy in action again:

A minute--perhaps more time--was passed in mute thought by both. On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.

Quite why any pair of idiots would be so clownish as to pass a minute or more doing nothing and formulating no plan is left unclear. Perhaps the best thing would have been for the two of them to jump off the cliff together and save the world from some quite questionable DNA.

However, that’s not what happens.

The next chapter opens with over two thousand words (Two! Thousand! Words!) of reflection of trilobites and much else. Then it turns out that Elfride has taken her greatly-skirted underthings off and is proposing to knot it into a rope. There follows the normal unhurried discussion of these things. (‘Now,' said Knight …, 'I can hold three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the strength of the knots, one by one.')

Then the rescue is effected.

A glorious narrative technique propelling the reader further and faster through the book?

Or a horrible mess?

I don’t, in all honesty, think there’s any real defence of the writing. I think, even taking period into account, it’s just bad prose. (You’re welcome to disagree.) But on the cliffhanger technique, I think:

• It was a good ploy for Hardy,
• And a terrible ploy for you.

Hardy, remember, was writing this book in serial form. So he needed a powerful way to keep his readers – and buying – from month to month. The cliffhanger technique certainly delivers a reason to make that additional purchase.

You’re not writing that way. A reader has paid their money and can, in principle, put the book down any time they want. Now, assuming that you are half-decent at your job, no reader will want to stop reading when your character is hanging by his fingertips from a cliff. So they’ll read on until your character has either plunged to his death, or been rescued via a string of knotted underwear.

So your chapter breaks need to reflect the natural beats of your reader. They’re a way for you to say:

“Now look, old buddy, in a way I’d prefer you to read my book at a sitting, then race around telling all your friends to buy a copy for themselves. But I know life isn’t always like that. Maybe you’ve reached your train stop and need to get off – or it is past midnight and you need to get up early in the morning – or perhaps one of your more beloved children is on fire and calling for help.

Whatever the case may be, there are times when you want to put the book down and would like a gentle hint from me – the author – as to when a break would feel most natural. I call those hints ‘chapters’ and I have marked them typographically, so you really can’t miss them when they arise.”

A cliffhanger is the absolute opposite of a natural break and I almost can’t think of a good reason why you should ever have one.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do a little bit of foreshadowing – effectively a ‘tune in next time, because …’ sort of message. Those things might show up as little closing snippets – this sort of thing:

‘She tried to sleep, but the moon flew high in the ragged clouds, and an owl screeched nearby, and her dreams were full of fighting.’

‘He stood up. He knew what he had to do. Now he – somehow – had to find a way to do it.’

Those things are not cliffhangers. They don’t stop the novel in the middle of a narrative beat. They are just a way of closing the beat, while at the same time making a promise that what follows will be worth reading.

That’s it from me. If you have written a cliffhanger worse than Thomas Hardy’s please send it in to me direct, and I shall buy you a cake as big as your head. The downside is that I’ll publish it.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Showing emotion

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

Plot Your Romance Novel video course task: Write a short romantic moment between two characters in two different ways:  One version with minimal spice. One version with a higher level of spice (don’t force yourself to write anything you feel uncomfortable with). Reflect on which approach feels most natural for your story (and for you) and share in the forum. Make sure to include trigger warnings where applicable. 

General task: Let’s do the same thing – pick a scene where two characters are becoming emotionally close. That could be a classic romantic scene. Or it could be a different sort of love manifesting – a mother greeting a long lost child, a son at his father’s deathbed.

Think about how you show emotion. What mixture do you make of: (a) straightforward emotional statements, (b) bodily sensations, (c) dialogue, (d) action, (e) more oblique suggestions of mood (e.g.: weather, atmosphere, surroundings.) And please make my day: let’s not just have a long list of body parts! When you're ready, upload your stuff here.

Til soon. 

Harry

When a manuscript is on submission, one of the most commonly heard reasons for rejection is that it fails to be ‘stand out’ enough in a saturated market.

With the number of books being published, there are few markets which don’t feel saturated these days. So how do you give your novel an edge that sets it apart? 

1. Hook

Introduce an unusual hook or ingredient. Perhaps it’s a chilling or unreliable narrator, or heady nostalgia that captures a certain era. Gone Girl gave us the twist we didn’t see coming at the midpoint, rather than at the end of the book. Colin’s Walsh’s literary thriller Kala plays with strands of time in a haunting, lyrical way that gives it a class all of its own. 

In my novel Two Little Liars, readers have cited the thread of witchcraft running through the story as adding something new and different compared with the average thriller. Whatever your element (or genre) is, aim to invoke a particular feeling or response in your reader, or a unique atmosphere that lingers long after the final page.

2. Setting

One of the finest compliments a writer can receive about their setting is that it feels like a character in itself. There are many ways in which this can be achieved, whether it’s an everyday domestic setting that should be one of safety and routine, or something unfamiliar such as a lonely mountain lodge or remote island. 

Homes, schools, and shopping centres can quickly become places of real menace when the uninvited is introduced: a window that shouldn’t be open, a noise where there should be silence, a nerve-jangling walk to the only car in a usually packed parking lot.  

3. High stakes

In any thriller, the standard ultimate cost to a character is their life, their liberty or the life of one of their loved ones. But think about other ways to elevate the danger.

What sort of toll will the events of your story take, both physically and emotionally on your protagonist? What will it do to the fabric of their family, their person, their reputation, or their conscience? These things show us who a character is and what they stand to lose, and ultimately they are things that make us care about a character’s fate.  

4. Characters you root for

Characters that feel real and authentic are flawed. They not only have surface flaws, such as being a bit clumsy or forgetful - they're characters who are capable of making life-changing, catastrophic errors of judgement or doing terrible things in moments of madness or to protect the people they love.

My character Erin is haunted by a past mistake that affects every facet of her life and her family, but it is possible to be invested in her because of her deep regret over her actions, and the love she has for her mother. While she acknowledges that she might deserve whatever is coming to her, her mum doesn’t, and it is this love that drives her and helps us to be on her side. 

And while we may not root for some characters, we can still be invested in their outcomes. I have never turned pages faster than when reading the diary entries from Colleen Hoover’s Verity, or despised a character as much as Beatrice Lacey in Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre, even though I understood what propels her to act as she does. We do not have to empathise with a character to care what happens to them next. In fact, a story is no less compelling when the opposite is true. 

5. The payoff

With any book, we want the ending to be a satisfying experience. By definition, a thriller should be thrilling: exciting, high octane, and a little bit scary (or very scary, even). 

A rewarding payoff could be as simple as a classic ‘kill or be killed’ showdown between your main character and the antagonist. It could do something that shocks or surprises the reader, such as offer a huge twist that turns the entire book on its head. It could have the villain seemingly getting away with it in a move that’s totally unforeseen. I barely breathed through the final scenes of Promising Young Woman, unable to believe what was happening.

The key to making these things emotionally gratifying is to thread obstacles to be overcome, and clues to be unravelled, leading up to this point. Twists that aren’t adequately seeded are more likely to leave a reader feeling cheated than fulfilled, so it’s vital there are breadcrumbs or double bluffs along the way to provide the ‘Aha, of course!’ moment as everything comes together. Ultimately, you goal should be to leave your reader feeling that their time with your book was well spent. 

Michelle Harrison is the bestselling author of twenty books for children, published in twenty-five territories. Her debut novel, 13 Treasures, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. Prior to being a full-time writer, Michelle was a bookseller for Waterstones and then an editorial assistant for Oxford University Press. She lives in Essex with her son and cats. Two Little Liars is her first novel for adults. Released on 4 June 2026, it's a chilling psychological thriller inspired by Osea Island, and the witch trials Essex was once well-known for. 

Some characters stay with us long after the book closes. They breathe. They ache. They remind us of someone we love – or someone we used to be.

“There is also the fact that you don’t want to get married,” I finish simply. “We are just too different. In the end, emotions, chemistry and sharing great banter just is not going to be enough to keep us together. Let me release you so you can find a nice uncomplicated woman who isn’t as goofy as me.”

“Suppose I just want goofy,” he says simply.

– The Marriage Monitoring Aunties Association (One More Chapter Books)

Sade and Jimi are the main characters in my latest romcom, where I show them loving, yearning, hurting and disappointing each other and walking away. Yes, they get back together in the end – but not without a big build-up of emotions.

Then there are characters who feel like cardboard cut-outs: technically correct, but emotionally hollow.

The difference isn’t the author’s talent. It’s emotional architecture – the inner scaffolding that makes a character feel real, layered, and alive.

This is the part most writers skip. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t know how to build it into their work.

1. Start with the wound, not the want

Every unforgettable character carries a wound – an old story they’ve been telling themselves about who they are and what they deserve. This wound shapes their choices, fears, and relationships.

• A woman who was overlooked as a child becomes hyper‑independent.
• A man who was abandoned becomes the one who leaves first.
• A girl who grew up invisible becomes the loudest person in the room.

When you understand the wound, the plot stops feeling forced. Your character’s decisions make emotional sense.

Once youembed some behaviour/habit/intuition in another character that unlocks or perpetuates your protagonist’s wound, everything else flows.

2. Give them a contradiction

Real people are messy. We say one thing and do another. We want love but fear vulnerability. We seldom say what is on our minds.

We are silent when someone says something that troubles us or makes us reflective. Sometimes we pause so that someone else knows we are irritated with them. We crave success but sabotage ourselves. We want peace but create chaos.

Characters who resonate with readers are those capable of holding two truths at once.

They might be…

• Confident but terrified of being truly seen
• Kind but capable of pettiness
• Loyal but secretly longing to escape.

Contradiction is human – and we need to see conflict within, as well as between characters.

3. Let their desire drive the plot

A character’s desire is the engine of your story. Not the external goal (“get the job”), but the emotional one (“prove I’m worthy”).

When readers understand what your character really wants, they root for them – even when they make mistakes.

This is why romance and romcoms hit so hard: the emotional desire is always front and centre.

4. Show the cost of staying the same

A character arc isn’t about change for the sake of change. It’s about the moment they realise:

“If I keep living like this, I will lose something I can’t bear to lose.” Maybe that’s the male or female character in a novel – or even their sense of self-worth or self-respect.

That’s when the story deepens. That’s when readers lean in.

5. Build emotional resonance through small, specific details

Readers don’t fall in love with characters because of grand speeches. They fall in love because of:

• The way she rearranges her mother’s flowers after every argument
• The way he checks the door twice before leaving
• The way she laughs too loudly when she’s nervous
• The way he gets silent the moment he gets defensive.

Specificity illuminates intimacy. Think of the rom coms or films that you remember today and what it was about the characters that still endears you, or energises you, years later. Use this to add intentionality to your characters.

That will keep readers with them on their journey.

Want more from Ola? She’s now available for one-to-one mentoring through Jericho Writers. Ola brings both warmth and experience to her mentoring, with a genuine desire to support aspiring authors to write the books that they’ve dreamed of.

Rachel McLaughlin, recipient of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme Bursary, is currently studying on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. She’s agreed to share her experience of the course with us month by month.

Wow, month two already – how time flies! Suffice to say, I am fully immersed in the course and loving every minute. 

This month, we’ve been focused on point of view. I’ve always gone with ‘what feels right’ for POV choices and, admittedly, will sometimes get tens of thousands of words into a draft then decide I MUST switch it up. I’m definitely guilty of treating a POV change as a ‘magic bullet’ for all everything that isn’t working. But the work this month – including our Lead Tutor call from Holly Seddon – made me realise that POV can be a much more deliberate and nuanced choice. I’m not promising that I won’t flip-flop on POV in future drafts, but if I do, it will definitely be a more informed decision!  

So, I have to mention my first official round of tutor feedback, because this was a big deal for me. While Holly had taken a look at my plan already, she’d not read any of my actual draft until now. And having my writing reviewed by an author whose work I admire? More than a little nerve-wracking! I delayed opening the email until I was home, in case it was overwhelming. Honestly, I’m glad I did because the second I read it, I was grinning and kicking my feet! Holly had written the loveliest things! Praise for the lines I thought worked, laughter in all the right places and constructive feedback on how to sharpen the passage – all of which I agreed with. There’s nothing more validating than having an author whose work you enjoy, write positive and helpful things about your draft. It was exactly the boost I needed. 

Following on from this, we had a one-to-one in which I was able to sound out a new idea I had for the manuscript. In the past, I’ve talked myself out of changes that felt too wild or ambitious but being able to talk it through with Holly was a complete game-changer. She wisely advised me that it can often be some of the more ‘whacky’ ideas that are exactly what a manuscript needs (especially if you as a writer are casting about for these). I’m excited to be implementing my plan to help make my story even twistier, so, watch this space... 

In our tutor group workshops, we’ve played around with point of view and narrative distance (the latter took some time to get my head around). The interactive element to these sessions has been so fun and it’s given me even greater appreciation of everyone’s creative abilities! It’s also just enjoyable to have a play with writing, especially when I’ve been so head-down in my manuscript.   

There was one week this month when life was just too busy for me to manage the homework. What I appreciate so much about the course is that this was totally fine! There’s such an understanding amongst the tutors and other course members that life can sometimes get in the way. After all, we all have other commitments, be it work, caring responsibilities, health etc. I was so grateful to be able to step back for a week, then pick back up with the content when I was able. I struggle with writers' guilt on the days I don’t progress my manuscript, so I was very thankful that there was no additional pressure from the course.  

So, what’s my learning point from this month? 

It has to be about intention. Holly quite rightly challenged me to think about some of the decisions in my manuscript – mostly because they weren’t decisions at all, I’d just fallen into the ideas. They ‘felt right’ (I’m learning that I’m somewhat of a ‘vibes’ writer at times!) I’ve realised it can be so helpful to wind back and think about the WHY. Why this point of view, why this level of narrative distance, why this setting, this character? It’s not that I think my choices aren’t valid, but if I’m more intentional, I can use them to my advantage. And this is where I think I can really elevate my writing. So, if I were to share any tips from this month, it would be that – think about what key choices you’ve made for your book and either lean into them or switch it up. It doesn’t matter which, as long as you’re intentional

Want to follow in Rachel's footsteps? You can learn more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and how it can help you on your writing journey.

Apply before 30 June 2026 to save 10% off our Winter 26/27 course (up to £603 / $774 USD!). Just enter code EARLY10 when you apply to secure your discount.

Ever read the first few lines of a story and just had to keep going? That’s exactly what the Friday Night Live (on a Saturday) competition is all about with the London Festival of Writing, but it's also about so much more. For example, last year's winner Kate Emilie kindly put together a guest article for us sharing her experience of the festival, competition and how it helped her land a two-book deal.

Don’t just take it from us. Let’s hear from some of last year’s finalists. They’ll tell you what the festival was like, how they found community and how those first few hundred words changed their writing game.

Tori Howe, 2025 Friday Night Live finalist

The London Festival of Writing was an incredible experience for me personally. I decided I had nothing to lose by entering the Friday Night Live (FNL) competition not expecting to get selected so when the email landed in my inbox telling me I was a finalist I was shocked & delighted.

I was nervous to read on stage, but I want to continue to grow as a writer and set an example to my children to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ in life. It was the first time I’d shared my romantic comedy material publicly, to hear laughter from the audience felt very gratifying and receiving live feedback from the judges was invaluable. 

At the festival I also had a One-to-One booked with an agent who gave me fantastic advice and encouragement. I left our meeting with my first full manuscript request and a renewed sense of focus on finishing the final third of my first draft. 

When I began querying a few months later I was fortunate to receive five offers of representation and have signed with my lovely agent (Sarah Brooks at Darley Anderson). 

I couldn’t have predicted any of this before the festival. The Jericho Writers team were a pleasure to deal with, their website is a treasure trove of resources. Meeting and chatting to other authors on the day and hearing inspiring talks were also highlights.

It’s a cliche but the writing community really is the best. All the FNL 2025 finalists have stayed in touch, and we continue to support each other a year later. 

Isabel Norris, 2025 Friday Night Live finalist

The London Festival of Writing was the very first writing event I attended, and I’m so glad I did. It was a truly transformative weekend for me. For a year beforehand I’d been working on my novel, watching the video masterclasses with Jericho, and even completed the Self-Edit Your Novel course, but it was the festival, where I had the opportunity to meet agents, industry professionals, and connect with fellow writers, that I finally felt like a ‘real’ writer. 

The Friday Night Live competition was the cherry on top of the cake of the weekend. To be chosen among so many talented writers was a thrill in itself, but to share the opening of my novel with the judging panel and a room full of my peers was both challenging and so rewarding. Though I didn’t win, I was approached by so many people that evening and the next day of the festival, many of them complimentary and excited by my work (one comment that my writing reminded them of Throne of Glass will stay with me forever!). That, and the bond I made with the other finalists, really gave me the confidence to start querying. Later that year I signed with an amazing literary agent, and I’m now preparing to get a new novel out on submission to publishers with them.

I left the festival with a notebook full of ideas, new connections that kept me sane through the tribulations of querying (and no doubt will support me as I go on submission), and a beautiful sense that the writing community is truly something special. My advice to any authors considering attending? Go for it!

Laura Daniels, 2025 Friday Night Live finalist

The London Festival of Writing 2025 gave me a fabulous opportunity to meet industry professionals, experience a mix of writing craft and community, and submit to the competition. 

On hearing I had made the final of Friday Night Live, my excited shock quickly turned to panic. I was advised by friends to video myself reading my opening pages, which I duly did. It was initially toe-curling, but it gave me the opportunity to practice, and on the night, it helped me get on stage. 

Facing a ballroom full of industry professionals and writers was daunting, but once I began to read from SMILE WHEN I WAKE, I realised many in the audience were not looking up at me as they were listening intently, which made it less intimidating. 

Receiving positive feedback from the panel members and other writers was a huge boost and has encouraged me to hone my novel. 

As I embark on the submission process to agents, being in the Friday Night Live final is a lovely accolade to include in my covering letter and a memory to treasure. I am excited to return to this year’s festival!

Larry Reynolds, 2025 Friday Night Live finalist

Attending the Jericho Writers London Festival of Writing was an immensely beneficial experience - great workshops and a wonderful opportunity to meet other writers. Being shortlisted for the Friday Night Live event was a huge boost to my confidence. For the first time I felt like my work might be good enough to get published. I’ve stayed in contact with my fellow FNL finalists and have found their ideas and practical support invaluable. More recently I’ve received some incredibly useful feedback from a Jericho Writers editor and now I’m ready to start querying!

Davina Bhanabhai, 2025 Friday Night Live finalist

It’s fair to say that the 2025 London Festival of Writing aligned my writing constellations and helped me secure agent representation!

I was initially invited by Becca Day as a speaker to the Festival, to present a workshop about Authenticity Editing. I’d never been to a writing festival before and was thrilled that Becca gave me the push I needed (thanks Becca!), to attend both as a speaker and a writer. I invested in myself and bought tickets to the whole weekend and enjoyed a stay in our gorgeous capital city, London.

The weekend was packed full of great sessions and workshops, talks by authors such as Ruth Ware, Sophie Flynn, Becca Day, Nikesh Shukla and Aliya Ali-Afzal, advice from industry professionals and helpful feedback from agent one-to-ones.

I entered the Friday Night Live (on a Saturday!), not expecting anything given I’d never entered before. To my astonishment, I was one of eight top finalists, chosen to read the first 500 words of my fiction novel. I was nervous, but I enjoyed reading my writing to an audience of over 300 people and a panel of judges, who gave positive, live feedback afterwards. Though I didn’t win on the night, it still ended up being a winning month for me as I secured agent representation from one of the judges on the panel. The night also gave me the confidence and motivation to complete my fiction novel, which was subsequently longlisted for Simon & Schuster’s New Chapter competition. I’m now on submissions for a non-fiction book, as well as working on edits on my fiction book.

If you’re considering attending, do it. A day, two days, the whole weekend, it’ll help get your creative juices flowing and you’ll meet a community of fellow writers who enjoy the same things you do, ‘get’ your writing obsession and open up conversations with “So, what are you working on/writing?”, and who will become good writerly friends. It may just give you the push you need to believe in your dreams, network with an exceptional team of trusted experts at Jericho Writers (Kat, Laura, Emily, Tanya, Imogen to name a few!), to help you along the way…maybe it’ll help align your writing constellations, too!

Here’s a thought.

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

And that’s true.

The simplest way of thinking about this is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Character blind spots

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

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

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

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

Til soon. 

Harry

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

Practical, not theoretical

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

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

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

Transferrable skills

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

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

Let’s break this down...

Structure, plot and pace

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

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

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

Crafting authentic characters

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

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

Voice: finding and refining it

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

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

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

Psychic distance: the gamechanger

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

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

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

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

The prose microscope

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

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

Confidence beyond the course

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

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

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

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

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

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

This email offers no solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just write that draft, then cut it. Easy.

“I really question whether this voice is right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wish I weren’t alone.”

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

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

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

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Together and apart

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

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

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

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

Til soon.

Harry

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

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

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

1. Be curious

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

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

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

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

2. Be in the world when you're out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Always ask: What if...?

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

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

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

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

What if...

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

4. Variety is key

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

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

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

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

5. Focus on emotions, not events

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

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

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

6. Consume stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in summary:

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

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

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

Does someone actually like your book?

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

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

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

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

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

This game is hard.

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

Oh yes, and one more thing:

Write well, edit hard.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Together and apart

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

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

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

Til soon. 

Harry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begin with a Bang

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

Up the stakes

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

Hit the beats

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

Cut, cut, cut

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

Polish your Prose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the very first bit: I am running fast.

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

And then: feet pounding the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lessons?

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

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

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

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

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

FEEDBACK FRIDAY // Body parts

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

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

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

Til soon. 

Harry

As I’ve been preparing to launch the new Writing Romance Novels course this May, I have been thinking a lot about the craft and skill it takes to write a really unforgettable love story.

What are the key elements that can help a writer conjure the alchemy that turns words on a page into emotions and experiences that stay with a reader long after they’ve turned the last page?

Here are my five ingredients that every epic romantic novel needs:

Authentic Characters

It doesn’t matter if your story is set in a romantasy universe, high-end fashion industry, or a cottage in Cornwall, if you create characters that feel real to the reader then you are giving them a reason to keep reading. Sometimes creating a character that readers invest in can be as simple as building them around a particular kind of inner conflict, past loss, fear of commitment, or lack of self-belief, for example. What really makes that character come to life, though, is attention to the details you discover about them during the writing process. Why do they have that scar on their knee? What might you find in their fridge? Why are they afraid of the dark?   There are many ways into creating characters but always make sure that your fictional people are individual enough to feel like you might meet them in real life and never fall into the trap of stereotypes or cliches.

High stakes

Unforgettable love stories tend to have main characters with a lot to lose and much to gain if they are willing to take the risk. The kind of stakes that you throw at your characters depends very much on the kind of love story you are writing. For example, in my novel From Now Until Forever, an immortal woman meets a dying man and they fall in love. Vita risks endless centuries of more loss if she allows herself to love again, Ben knows that if he loves Vita, he will inevitably break her heart. Do they risk it all for love? The drama, the rising tension, the risk and reward will to some extent be guided by whether you are writing a romantic comedy or perhaps dark romance, but the stakes should feel real and important and the consequences of things going wrong urgent and compulsive. Then your reader has to know what will happen.

World-building

This doesn’t just apply to romantasy or fantasy novels, where world-building is about creating a whole alternative universe for readers to explore. Where and how we set our stories is always so important. Setting informs plot and it shapes character. Would Cathy and Heathcliff be who they are without the wild Yorkshire Moors? Would Claire and Jamie’s love story in the Outlander novels feels as sweeping and as all-encompassing without the Scottish Highlands and a stone circle or two? Even if your story is centred around a coffee shop on the high street, your readers want to inhabit a three-dimensional world that evokes all of their senses, and using setting intentionally can add emotional depth and richness to every story. 

Romantic tension

Unresolved romantic or sexual tension is essential to a love story that seeks to build on yearning and anticipation. Romance readers want an uplifting, emotionally satisfying ending, but they can take a lot of build-up, near misses and outright pain on the way there! Creating crackling chemistry between your two lovers is essential. Think about their arc of attraction as a separate entity to see how you might track your romantic throughline. How and where are you going to take your main characters from first meeting to first kiss? What’s the tension that keeps them apart, the longing that pulls them together? What obstacles will they face? Who are they on page one, and who must they become by the end of the novel to have earned their moment of fulfilment? After the big sweeps pay attention to the details; these are often the sexiest moments in a love story, glances, the lightest touches, proximity, the sensation, the emotion, the longing built into something epic through many small moments. 

Emotional fulfilment

Within the romance genre readers want a happy ever after or a happy for now and they want it to feel like a satisfying payoff, where your authentic characters overcome high stakes to finally let the sparks fly in their sizzling chemistry. In love stories in a broader sense, the ending might not always be happy in a traditional sense, but it should always leave the reader brim full of emotional fulfilment. Everything you do as a writer is building towards that end sequence, and you want it to be not only a resolution but a memory that will live on in the mind of your reader. The ending of an unforgettable love story will feel earnt, it will feel cathartic. It should feel inspiring and aspirational. If you’ve done a really good job, the story will live on in the minds of your readers without you.

Rachel McLaughlin, recipient of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme Bursary, is currently studying on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. She’s agreed to share her experience of the course with us month by month.

Oh my. A whole month already? There’s so much I have to say about my first month on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme! But first, let me start with how things were going before I joined the course (promise there won't be too much exposition!) 

I’d been writing on and off for years, but it wasn’t until I went to the London Festival of Writing in 2024 that I felt I was finally allowed to call myself a writer. (Why do we hold ourselves back like this? Self-rejection is something I’m still trying to unlearn.) The festival was my first proper toe-dip into the writing community and honestly, I LOVED it. Considering I’m usually introverted with a limited social battery, I felt like a different person around other writers. Just more me. This was probably my first clue that a writing course would be a great fit.  

Fast forward a couple of years and I had one completed manuscript and several part-baked ideas. There was one idea that kept niggling at me, desperate to be written. I went all in, wrote 20,000 words, then hit a wall. I'd tied myself in knots with character arcs, story beats and plot lines. It suddenly felt like more effort than it was worth, and shiny new ideas were calling.  

This was when the bursary opportunity popped up. I’d entered writing competitions before but never won anything. The thought of a structured course, with guidance, feedback and a supportive community was enough to push me to give it a go, despite my doubts that I wouldn’t be ‘good enough’. SO glad I didn't self-reject this time! 

I truly couldn’t believe my luck when I received the email that I’d won. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I immediately sent it to my mum (and fellow writing buddy!) to check it was real!  

Our first call happened to be on my birthday and though I was initially nervous, it was such a lovely introduction to how everything would work. Everyone was friendly and I was quickly reassured. 

Our first month has focused on planning. Ideal for me since I’m convinced it was the lack of a coherent plan that stalled my progress. I didn’t know what to expect, but our first Lead Tutor call was fantastic. Andrew Miller presented a narrative about coming up with ideas that was so incredibly relatable, it was almost spooky! How did he know about my stash of patterned notebooks, that I came up with the idea at the beach, that I’d got so very stuck with it? Suffice to say, it was all very validating! 

The first tutor group session with Holly Seddon, was wonderful. Holly’s introduction was so kind and inspirational that I immediately knew I was in safe hands. I must admit, I did read her latest book which prompted a fan-girl moment combined with minor panic (she’s going to be reading my work? Gulp!) But I didn’t need to worry. As I’m writing this, I've just opened up my first assignment feedback. Did I delay opening the email because of nerves? Yes, I did. There was no need! Holly’s comments were thoughtful and encouraging, and I’m so excited to chat it through in our one-to-one session next week!  

One of my favourite things so far has to be my lovely Tutor Group. We give each other weekly feedback, which has already been so helpful. Being able to share in someone else’s writing journey is such a privilege, and I can already tell these are connections that will last well beyond the course. Can’t wait to see their books on the shelves! 

So, what are my takeaways? A few things: 

• Be prepared to be lost. This was from Andrew’s call, and it was a real eye-opener. I’d always thought of the writing journey as being relatively linear (silly me!) and that stepping away from a manuscript meant it wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t good enough to write it. Hearing that this is often a necessary part of the process was SO encouraging.  

• Writing peers are invaluable. They bring their own worlds and perspectives to your work that can really help you grow.  

• Don’t self-reject! Take the chance, do the competition, put your work out there. You never know what it might lead to... 

I can’t wait to see what the course brings next! I hope you’ll join me on the journey... 

Want to follow in Rachel's footsteps? You can learn more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and how it can help you write a publishable novel in a year!

Before we get to walks long or short, I have news:

FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE

Coming to the Festival of Writing in London on 13/14 June? Then remember we are now open for Friday Night Live submissions. That competition can be career-altering for the winner, and has been so ever since we first launched it fifteen years ago. We also have two bursary opportunities for All Access Passes, so if you’re interested in exploring those, please go for it. And if you’ve not yet booked your ticket – well, you dullard, you dolt, you clown, you clot, what do you think you’re waiting for?

SCAM ALERT

Also, just be aware that I've had this message from Al Campbell, a web-savvy self-publisher. He tells me that there has been a "rise of scammers sending self-published authors very well constructed (AI) based emails with very positive reviews of their books, offering paid-for promotion. In the past 3 weeks I have had offers for coverage on two major radio stations in the UK (including Classic FM), a proposal from a named and actual editorial director at a well-respected US platform called Shelf Awareness, and sundry other offers. Having checked these out directly with the stations, and spoken via email to the editorial director of Shelf Awareness,  they have all been scams."

Those scams may be extremely plausible with accurate scans of the signatures of real decision-makers. So, please, always check these things out with care. If it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

OK, walks.

Sinclair Lewis (the American novelist, who went on to collect a Nobel Prize), was advised, at an early point in his career, that ‘The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.’

That is: the only walk you ought to be doing each day is from your kitchen to your office, mug in hand, ready to bash at that keyboard for as many hours as your real work / annoying spouse / yet-more-irritating kids / broken cars / needy mothers / unmown lawns allow you to do.

There’s truth in all that, yes.

Novels don’t write themselves. They also don’t edit themselves, title themselves, or market themselves to agents. I’ve never actually counted how long it takes to write a novel, but we’re well into hundreds of hours. Perhaps if you count all the editing / submitting / marketing / working with agents and publishing work, then the average novel clocks in at well over a thousand hours of hard graft.

So: seat of pants / seat of chair – a good basic rule to apply often.

But often, even very often, isn’t quite the same as always.

In my last email, I spoke about the disaster that happens when a writer applying the ‘seat of pants / seat of chair’ rule too obediently charges off into chapter two, before properly finding the voice that will sustain the book and make it stand out from the crowd.

That’s one version of the risk – but really, you can create huge issues for yourself whenever you prioritise building word-count over checking for problems.

• Would your villain be better as a woman or as a man?
• Have you foreshadowed your themes early enough in the novel?
• Is there a proper coherence or resonance between your A-story and your B-story?
• Does your basic concept still feel like it works now that you’re 20,000 words into the novel?

And so on. There are a million questions like this which might arise as you work, and which can’t best be answered while staring at a computer screen.

So that’s when it’s time for your long walk. Ideally, you do that properly. You book a little retreat cottage somewhere. You turn your phone off, or at least ignore it. You go on long walks with the wind on your face. And you allow your mind to drift widely and loosely over your story.

If you find yourself encountering a niggle – an awkwardness, a sense of something not fitting – you need to attend to that thought. Be open to other possibilities, to what seem like radical changes.

If you are too close to the novel – if it’s literally open in front of you – those thoughts are always at the back of the queue for attention. If you’re too obsessed by building word-count, you’ll tend to neglect the little voices of caution or concern.

So, yes, let the short walk from the kitchen to your laptop be your main walk. The one you do almost daily. The one that gets you to that thousand hours.

But give yourself space for the wind-on-you-face walk too. The ‘what if I …?’ type thoughts. Open a door to possibility and see if inspiration happens to wander in, carrying flowers.

And there endeth the lesson. Tis a (mercifully) short one today.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Present tense

A quirky little challenge that comes from a couple of things I’ve read this past week. And the issue is this: are you writing in the right tense, and if you are, are you writing well or badly in that tense?

So, the task this week is either:

Take 150-200 words of your text and swap into past tense (if you now write in the present) or vice versa. Which works best? Are you happy with your choice?

Or:

If you’re writing in the present tense and you’re worried that your prose feels a bit artificial – a bit writer-y – then give us a chunk that you’re worried about.

Either way, as ever, we want title / genre and any context please.

That will help others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you're ready, you can post your work here.

Til soon.

Harry

What’s the most important part of a book? Well, it’s either the beginning or the ending, but in commercial terms, you’d probably have to pick out the start, because if that bit flunks, no one will find out what you do later on.

So beginnings matter.

And which bit of the novel does a new writer tackle first? Well, duh, the beginning, of course.

So the normal way of doing things is that woefully inexperienced writers take on the most important part of their projects first thing. It’s like a newbie architect deciding that he’ll tackle the Dome of St Peter's as his first build, rather than say, a school toilet block, or a nice little kitchen extension.

Now, yes, writing is easier to revise than a large stone dome, but there are some important issues here.

First, as you all know, I think it’s beyond essential to get a proper concept for your book in place, before you start to write it. I know it’s tempting just to race away when then ideas start fizzing, but it is a disaster to race off west-nor-west, if you’re actually trying to head north. I’ve known a zillion manuscripts where a writer has battled endlessly with trying to get it just right … and more or less did so. But when the fundamental concept was not saleable, all that work was for nothing.

So get that concept right. Don’t put pen to paper until you’ve done so.

But that’s not today’s topic. Let’s assume you have a cracking concept. Let’s assume you have started writing – the first two or three pages of your new book.

What’s the one thing you really need to check before you go any further? What’s the one bit that has to be right?

Story? I don’t think so. I’ve written books where nothing much happens in the first chapter. Yes, there’ll be a wriggling hint of an emerging story, but (a) not a lot and (b) it wouldn’t take more than a few lines of editing to get one in there anyway.

Character? Well, yes, that’s a better guess, except that you don’t necessarily start with your main character, and the early-on character reveals are likely to be quite modest anyway.

So what I think really matters – matters so much that it comes second only to basic novel concept / pitch – is voice.

If you start bland – if you accept bland – if bland is how you begin your book – then the entire novel is likely to drive down the Autoroute de Blandeur, the Autobahn von Boring, the Motorway of Mediocre.

It’s not that books without voice can’t sell – they do – it’s just that they are up against a ton more competition. Why should an agent or publisher pick out your basically cookie-cutter book from the pile? I mean, yes, a strong concept will always help, but you’re giving yourself a huge and needless handicap by taking that route.

Here are the openings of a handful of kids’ books:

1. The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White (1938)

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales,  while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles. She did not rap Kay’s knuckles because when Kay grew older he would be Sir Kay, and the master of the estate. The Wart was called the Wart because it rhymed with Art, which was short for his real name. Kay had given him the nickname. Kay was not called anything but Kay, because he was too dignified to have a nickname and would have flown into a passion if anybody had tried to give him one.”

My comment:

Yes, this text is almost 100 years old and wouldn’t work well today. But it already boils with invention and wit and a bubble of character interplay. You pretty much know from this tiny chunk that you are going to be happy to curl up with this author for the next 300 pages. (He won’t disappoint you.)

2. Jolly Foul Play, Robin Stevens (2016)

“We were all looking up, and so we missed the murder.

I have never seen Daisy so furious. She has been grinding her teeth (so hard that my teeth ache in sympathy) and saying, ‘Oh Hazel, how could we not notice it? We were on the spot!’

You see, Daisy needs to know things, and see everything, and get in everywhere. Being reminded that despite all the measures she puts in place (having informants in the younger years, ingratiating herself with the older girls and Jones the handyman and the mistresses), there are still things going on at Deepdean that she does not understand  - well, that has put her in an even worse mood than the one she's been in lately.

And, if I am honest, I feel strangely ashamed. The Detective Society has solved three real murder mysteries so far and yet we still missed a murder taking place under our noses.”

My comment:

The prose here isn’t bouncing with obvious invention, but it’s slick enough to do the two things it wants to establish immediately. First – establish that this is a book about some girls solving murders. (Brilliant idea.) Second – establish that this will be a book about characters and personalities and emotional interplay just as much as it’s about clues and corpses. (There is, in fact, much more of the former than the latter in this small chunk, even though it’s ostensibly about murder.)

The prose isn’t showy, but it is supple enough to handle all this. When the narrator wants to emphasise quite how much Daisy needs to know things, she gives us a sentence so big, it bulges at the seams. When she wants to address her sense of shame, she does so in fewer than 10 words.

3. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper (1973)

“He remembered Mary had said, ‘They all speak Welsh, most of the time. Even Aunt Jen.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Will.

‘Don't worry,’ his sister said. ‘Sooner or later they switch to English, if they see you're there. Just remember to be patient. And they will be extra kind because of your having been ill. At least they were to me after my mumps.’

So now Will stood patiently alone on the windy grey platform of the small station of Tywyn, in a thin a drizzle of October rain, waiting while two men in the navy-blue railway uniform argued earnestly in Welsh. One of them was small and wizened, gnome-like; the other had a soft, squashy look, like a man made of dough.”

My comment:

Again, nothing ostentatious here, but still sophisticated. We learn immediately that this book will be careful where relationships, feelings and morals are concerned – that’s the message of the first three paragraphs – whilst the physical description of the last paragraph is original, age-appropriate and interesting, without attempting to be “LOOK AT ME” interesting. It’s carefully judged and spot on. You already believe in the setting, believe in the relationship between the kids – and believe in the author’s fundamental humanity.

4. The Accidental Secret Agent, Tom McLaughlin, (2016)

“‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have spent a lifetime hiding in the shadows but today we finally get what we've all been waiting for. For today is Judgement Day. I look around this room and it makes me proud.’ Mr X paused to puff on a large cigar.

‘Look at the great things we've already done. We steal, not to make us rich, but because we can. We hurt, not because we're scared, but because we are courageous. And today, we destroy the world!’

Knowing nods rippled round the room which corrupt politicians, ghastly gangsters, and vile villains. [sic – this is how the sentence actually reads.]

‘We are finally ready,’ said Mr X, sitting at the end of a very long table. ‘All I need to do is press this red button and –’

‘PIZZA!’ a chirpy voice interrupted.”

My comment:

This is all just shouting. It’s cliché, but not even clever cliché. It’s a desperate (and successful) attempt to get publishers and kids to attach to the book by offering maximum volume, maximum knockabout humour from the very first paragraph. What makes it worse, is that all this is just a dream – as bad a way to start a book as you can find.

Again, I’m not saying you can’t be commercially successful doing that, but (a) you have to fight off a lot more competition and (b) there is not a chance that this book will be read or in print in 50 or 100 years’ time, unlike the books by White and Cooper.

And you?

Well, take care. In all four of these cases, the author established very, very early the approach they were going to be taking in all the rest of the book.

As you can see from both the Robin Stevens example and the Susan Cooper one, the approach can be subtle – not loud – but still perfectly pitched to the kind of books they want to write. A less highly attuned version of either voice would have set the authors off on a much poorer journey altogether.

And because voice goes under the radar a bit – it feels much more productive and important to draw up mind maps of your plot and spreadsheets of character interactions – you can easily misnavigate from the start.

Don’t.

Get your concept right. Get your voice right. Do those two things, do them well – and you’re good to go.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Voice

Give us any 250-word passage that properly exhibits the voice you’ve adopted. (Probably don’t choose the very opening chunk of your work, just because we do that quite often.)

As ever, give us the title, genre and context of your chunk, but also say something about what you’re trying to do with that voice – what characteristics do you think it has, and why does that work well with your novel?

Please title your post in this format: title / genre / [anything else we need to know]. That will help others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you're ready, you can post your work here.

Til soon.

Harry