This week \u2013 on Tuesday if you really have to know \u2013 I did a live event for Premium Members, in which I did some live editing of people\u2019s work. Massive kudos to the people who put themselves up for such things; hat tip to each and every one of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were some lovely pieces of work, include a mental-but-joyous piece on time travel and British sarcasm and anger management and English as spoken by Czechs. It also used \u2018you\u2019 as the narrative voice, which is a very rare choice but, honestly, I think it worked. (And I\u2019m not usually a fan of fancy footwork for its own sake.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway. One theme which came out of the event is, I think, worth sharing more widely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re often told, as writers, that novels should be pacy. The idea is that if a novel is \u2018pacy\u2019 readers will keep turning the pages. Indeed, that proposition is so close to universally accepted that \u2018pacy page-turner\u2019 feels almost like tautology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t agree. Yes, there are pacy page-turners. James Patterson is the most prominent practitioner of this approach. Pages seldom go by without a gunshot, a kiss, an escape, an explosion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But other approaches are possible. Harlan Coben (a talented guy, who\u2019s much funnier in real life than he chooses to be on the page) writes high-twist \/ high-event fiction, but he pauses much more. There\u2019s more time for character and setting to bloom. Most commercial authors follow a template more like Coben\u2019s than Patterson\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, people turn the pages of a book, because they\u2019re engaged<\/em> in the story. Lots of explosions generates one kind of engagement, but really caring about characters generates another. The best books combine decent story with rich characters: that is, they are not-especially-pacy page-turners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okie-doke. That\u2019s a long preamble, but now take a look at this. (From the Countess Elizabeth von Billigerkaese. She had a uniformed flunky cross the North Sea in a rowing boat to bring us the text; she thinks email is for poor people.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pam realised the landlady had mistaken her pause as a compliment. \u2018I used to stay here with my husband. The last time was just before he became.., before he died. I think we were in this very room. It\u2019s certainly changed a lot. I mean the rooms didn\u2019t have an en-suite then,\u2019 she added.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I\u2019m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor\u2019s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The landlady nodded. \u2018She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Oh, I\u2019m sorry. Dementia?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now this is good (and the passage gets better. Turns out the landlady believes in the spirit world and \u2018communicates\u2019 regularly with the dead. She assumes that\u2019s why Pam is here: to reach her husband.) The piece is simple, but deft. Even from this tiny fragment, we feel Pam keen to please, to say the right thing. The landlady is played just right too. Not purple veils and rings on every finger. Just \u2013 a woman who really believes she can talk to the dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Good stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But? For my money (and it\u2019s always hard to judge these things out of context) we want a tiny bit more here. So Pam says to the landlady, \u2018she was so kind and a great cook\u2026\u2019 That\u2019s clearly Pam\u2019s version of the socially necessary politeness. Oh, it was your aunt who used to run this place? You probably quite like her. I should say something positive<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that doesn\u2019t tell us what Pam really thought, so that\u2019s something we might want to add. And what about Pam\u2019s dead husband? He\u2019s in Pam\u2019s thoughts, because she\u2019s here, in a place where they used to stay, remembering their last visit. And the room has changed its d\u00e9cor. And were the breakfasts all that good anyway?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, we can\u2019t just fill in every detail that occurs to us \u2013 we don\u2019t want to drown the text \u2013 but we can do something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wrote something impromptu on Tuesday, which I can\u2019t now recover, but it went something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I\u2019m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor\u2019s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Pam wasn\u2019t sure that she had been a great cook. The breakfasts were abundant and full of meat, and her husband had loved them. But the only time Pam had cleared her plate, she ended up feeling rather like the new bolsters on the bed: overstuffed, yellow, inert. A slight sheen.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The landlady nodded. \u2018She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the addition of 50 words. That\u2019s hardly going to capsize things, but here we have:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Pam\u2019s real thoughts as opposed to her purely social ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. Something connecting this dialogue back to her husband (whom she is surely thinking about.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. Something that connects to the physical setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. And something that connects to the theme here. Those references to meat and inert bolsters put a little scent of death into this scene, without our needing to name it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, of course, I don\u2019t know the book and maybe this added piece of text is quite wrong for Pam, or her husband, or for the theme, or whatever. But assume that Countess Elizabeth sits down in her Schloss and adds 50 words of text to her own specifications that picks up the four elements above \u2013 inner Pam, husband, setting, theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her book has just got a little less pacy, and a little bit more layered. Less shortcrust, more puff pastry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Has it got better or worse? I\u2019m pretty diddle-dum-certain that her book\u2019s just got better \u2013 and not least because this is a significant passage. It\u2019s the one where the book\u2019s Big Idea is about to be introduced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Layering matters, and you can do a lot with a little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s it from me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Countess Elizabeth is annoyed with me. She handwrites her book on vellum made from calves reared on the Billigerkaese estate. Each time she makes a correction, it\u2019s a lot of rewriting \u2013 and a lot of calves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n