{"id":6724,"date":"2022-02-11T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/one-small-thing\/"},"modified":"2022-02-11T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-02-11T14:00:00","slug":"one-small-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/one-small-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"One Small Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I happened to see a clip of Amazon\u2019s Reacher<\/em> TV series, based on Lee Child\u2019s bestselling thrillers.<\/p>\n

And the clip I saw, had Jack Reacher \u2013 a giant of a man at 6\u2019 5\u201d and arms like tree trunks \u2013 step off a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere. I don\u2019t know what happened next, because I was looking for something else, but boof, right there, you know you\u2019re in Reacher-land. You\u2019re in Lee Child\u2019s universe and nowhere else.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not a thriller-reader, you may not be aware, but Jack Reacher is an ex-military policeman. He\u2019s big, strong and an astonishing fighter. Those things are run-of-the-mill for this kind of territory, but the element which makes the books stand out is that Reacher has nowhere to live. He travels on buses, sleeps in motels, and carries no luggage. He owns literally nothing. When his clothes get dirty, he discards them and buys fresh. That\u2019s why when a big, handy-looking man steps off a bus without luggage, you know instantly, who it is.<\/p>\n

And look: Lee Child\u2019s novels are excellent. They\u2019re thriller masterclasses. The tone is spot on. The invention. The intelligence. The technical knowledge. The prose style won\u2019t win the Booker, but the prose style is dead right for these books.<\/p>\n

All the same, very good books often drop out of sight. Lee Child\u2019s didn\u2019t. How much did that owe to the instant recognition factor \u2013 the branding element \u2013 of Reacher\u2019s mobile lifestyle? Well, I don\u2019t know, but it definitely helped.<\/p>\n

Or since we\u2019re talking thrillers, think of James Bond. Fleming\u2019s early work wasn\u2019t all that strong in a way. But he had a British assassin \u2013 a state assassin \u2013 who was expert in wines and snobbish about clothes. (Or, actually, just snobbish.) Narrow Bond down to a brand, and what you have is instantly recognisable. Here\u2019s a guy whose palate is discriminating enough to care whether a cocktail is shaken or stirred, but he can still beat the living daylights out of an adversary. That\u2019s pretty much the opposite of Reacher, but it\u2019s still excellent branding.<\/p>\n

Or forget thrillers. My kids are, at the moment, delighting in the Igguldens\u2019 The Dangerous Book for Boys<\/em> and its Double Dangerous<\/em> follow-up.<\/p>\n

Here, the branding narrows down to a single word, Dangerous<\/em>. There isn\u2019t actually anything dangerous about the book. It doesn\u2019t tell you how to tightrope-walk over waterfalls. It doesn\u2019t advise you to set your head on fire. But it\u2019s gleefully keen on the kind of masculine interests and activities that have somewhat lost favour in recent decades: military history, paper planes, carpentry, card tricks, tree houses, party games, constellations, casting techniques. That word dangerous opens up a world of the Good Masculine. It gives it the glitter of something forbidden, exciting, alluring.<\/p>\n

It’s a quite brilliant word, the best thing about a fine pair of books.<\/p>\n

And yet, if the purpose of this email was to talk about One Small Thing \u2013 to suggest how a single word can be the difference between bestseller-success and quiet adequacy \u2013 I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve succeeded.<\/p>\n

Because although the examples I\u2019ve given do narrow down to something small \u2013 a lifestyle, a snobbery, a word \u2013 they also open up into something big.<\/p>\n

Take The Dangerous Book for Boys<\/em>. That one word inspired a genius bit of cover design \u2013 here<\/a>. The design was retro, nostalgic, but also proclaiming something of a manifesto. \u201cLook, the 1950s might have had plenty of bad male archetypes and things that, as a society, we\u2019re pleased to have moved on from. But what about the good stuff? What about the men who knew history, and could handle a power saw, and could find true north from the moss on a tree trunk or the tilt of a constellation. This book celebrates all that \u2013 we\u2019re retro and proud.\u201d<\/p>\n

The contents of the book then followed through. Plenty of what\u2019s in that book is totally inappropriate for kids. Are my children really going to build a tree house? Of course not. But that didn\u2019t matter. The logic of that word dangerous, and that brilliant cover design, all pointed to a book that celebrated a certain kind of old-fashioned manhood and didn\u2019t care too much if it was child-appropriate or not.<\/p>\n

And again: brilliant. There are any number of activities books for kids. Some are good, some are bad, but none of them are going to sell 1.5 million copies in hardback. That word dangerous pointed to and encapsulated a defiant opposition to the normal expectations of an activities book for children, and in that defiance lay its success.<\/p>\n

The point here, I guess, is that \u2013 if you can \u2013 you should try to find the One Small Thing that nudges your book from a perfectly acceptable work to something with extraordinary potential.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the shift from An Activity Book for Kids<\/em> to The Dangerous Book for Boys<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the shift from a thriller led by an ex-military policeman to one led by an ex-MP who lives on buses and owns nothing.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the shift from an ordinarily professional government agent to one who\u2019s at once Etonian-suave and East End-violent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometimes you only need a small shift of perspective to find that thing. Sometimes you\u2019ll never find it (and still produce a perfectly fine and saleable work.) Sometimes, you\u2019ll find an idea that nudges some of your other, earlier ideas aside so forcefully, you\u2019ll end up with something other than the thing you first set out to create.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not great at the One Small Thing. My emails are too long. My books are too long. Even my short stories are too long. That teeny dab of marketing genius is something I find hard.<\/p>\n

But does it work? You bet it does. Hunt the One Small Thing in your own work \u2013 change your work if you have to – and good luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I happened to see a clip of Amazon\u2019s Reacher TV series, based on Lee Child\u2019s bestselling thrillers. And the clip I saw, had Jack Reacher \u2013 a giant of a man at 6\u2019 5\u201d and arms like tree trunks \u2013 step off a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere. I don\u2019t know what happened<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/one-small-thing\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"One Small Thing – Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I happened to see a clip of Amazon\u2019s Reacher TV series, based on Lee Child\u2019s bestselling thrillers. 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I've published trad & self-pub. Love both. Best known for my Fiona Griffiths crime series. Oh yes, and I'm the capo di tutti capi at Jericho Writers.","url":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/author\/harryjericho\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}