Leaking steam

This week – and inspired by your excellent responses to Feedback Friday – we’re going to be talking steam engines and the particular importance of not leaking steam. Or, if you happen to be more interested in books than engines, then the importance of not leaking pressure from your book.

The good news is that some quite small changes will deliver a substantial improvement in reader experience. Better still: the changes aren’t even hard. They’re about mindset more than anything else.

First though, with a tinkle of very small cymbals and a clatter on a kettle drum remanufactured from a dressmaker’s thimble, it’s time for …

Feedback Friday

Free agent feedback: Since our festival is approaching, I had the bright idea of helping you prepare for any agent one-to-ones you may have booked for our weekend in London.

This week, we’ll be giving away three free agent one-to-ones (the ones you can book at any time of the year). I’m going to pick the pitches I like the best. If you’re successful, you get to put your work directly in front of a literary agent and I very much hope that leads to good things. But of course, you gotta be in it to win it.

So, without further ado, let’s look at your pitch!

• Book title
• About your book: A maximum of one short sentence to identify basic genre / premise or whatever else someone might need to know. (“A contemporary police procedural set in Cardiff” for example.)
• Your pitch, the dirty version. “Robot which mows lawns”, for example. Maximum 12 words here and less is better.
• Your pitch, the pretty version. “Mow while you sleep – the lazy gardener’s route to perfect lawns,” for example. Max 25 words.

The dirty pitch is for you, no one else. It’s the Post-It you stick above your computer monitor. It’s the tag which reminds you of your book’s USP. The thing that keeps you centred. A five-word reminder to keep you on track as you write.

The pretty pitch is for the front of the book, maybe, in time.

And honestly? The pretty pitch doesn’t matter. The dirty one does.

The point of the dirty pitch is to make someone – in this case me – think, “Ooh, sounds interesting, tell me more.” I don’t want pretty. I want interesting. If you look at those two pitches for lawn robots, the first one would work miles better in any real-life conversation between you and your friends. If you gave a friend what sounds like a marketing pitch, they’d think you’d gone nuts. If you just used the dirty pitch to explain why you’ve got a new orange and black gadget on your grass, then anyone with a lawn will want to know more.

So, that’s the assignment. As usual, I’ll do what I can, but I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.

Share them here.

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Leaking steam

Steam engines existed before James Watt. Famously, Watt – then an instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow – became interested in the problem when he was asked to repair a model steam-engine that followed Thomas Newcomen’s basic design.

Newcomen’s engine worked, but badly. A coal-fired furnace boiled water, forcing steam into a cylinder which drove a piston. So far so good: a coal-fired power station uses the same system today.

But to get the piston back to its starting position, Newcomen’s device simply cooled the cylinder, turning steam back into water, altering the pressures and closing the piston.

This arrangement meant that the furnace was called upon to repeatedly warm the cylinder back up to a point where it didn’t immediately condense the steam. Watt’s little piece of genius was to create a separate condensing chamber, so that the furnace could deal with the steam only, not the cylinder too.

That was his speck of genius, but he was also a very good development engineer. Getting a really good seal for the piston wasn’t as important, but it was still important and he cared about every detail.

All through this development work, Watt saw his challenge as one of minimising waste. Minimising the waste of coal, minimising the waste of heat.

I tell you all this (fantastically interesting) stuff because I want you to think about your book in the exact same way.

At the moment, your manuscript resembles a Newcomen engine. Which is very good indeed! It means that you’ve done almost all the hard work. You’ve built a plot, you’ve engineered characters, you’ve thrown 80,000 words (or whatever) on the page. You have a manuscript.

But the challenges you’ve had so far are quite macro in scale: deliver a plot, write 80,000 words, and so on. At a certain stage, you need to flip things. You need to think about leakages of steam. Places where your book leaks reader-interest through tiny little cracks and crevices. Each one of those losses is small. Cumulatively, however, they can threaten to be lethal.

But which is better:

Sentence A. Burning brakes, upholstery damp and ghosts of fast food turned the air into a warm soup of smells that caught the back of my throat like two fingers.

Or:

Sentence B. The car smelled of hot brakes, damp upholstery and the ghosts of fast food.

You only have to drop those two on the page to see that the second one is better. The first one has a whole lot of baggy language “turned the air into a warm soup of smells” that really doesn’t add anything much. (Of course, smells change the air. What else could they change?) and the thing about catching the back of the throat “like two fingers” almost makes sense, but doesn’t quite. Really, for clarity, the sentence needs to read “like two fingers shoved down the throat as though seeking to produce retching.” But that’s way too cumbersome, so the author (rightly) cut off most of the baggage. Her only error was not cutting even more.

And the funny thing here is that the sentence is really good! I mean, those three smells placed together in a sentence are really evocative. The writer’s actually done the hard work (of building the engine) and not done the easy work (of preventing any steam leaking out from dodgy joins.)

Here are some other simple checks to make – of your opening page especially, but really of every line in your book:

Do you have tiny redundancies?

For example, “so she was happy with the situation as it stood” could probably (depending on context) be replaced by “she was happy with the situation” or even “She was happy.”

Likewise, it’s easy to write things like “clouds covered the sky” or the ”wind blew” or “the rain made the pavements wet”, but what else do we possibly expect clouds, wind and rain to do?

Simply tightening these tiny things means your story can convey the exact same amount of meaning, but in a much smaller space. That’s more pressure, less leakage – a better engine.

Do you switch points of view?

Yes, this is something you can do in a book, though (mostly not only) around chapter breaks. But changing POV on your first page? That’s literally disorienting the reader at a point where their #1 priority is getting themselves properly oriented. There are probably exceptions, of course, but in general, just don’t do this. It’ll almost always be a mistake.

Do you hop about in time?

I’ve talked about that before, so I won’t bang on about it now. But if your #1 task is to help the reader orient themselves in your book, then don’t disorient them by giving them multiple times – or indeed places – to deal with.

Do you fail to tell the reader where you are?

You don’t need to offer co-ordinates of time and place, but any drama needs to take place on a stage – and the readers needs to see that stage. So to my eyes, that sentence we looked at earlier – about hot brakes and damp upholstery – sets the scene beautifully. Whatever dramatic action we are about to witness feels placed. We know how to imagine the sequence of events that follows.

But it’s really common for writers just to jump straight into the action / dialogue without any meaningful explanation of where we are. Or sometimes, the author kind of ticks a box (“They were in the Great Hall of Ra-Thamar”), but without actually providing any material to help the reader imagine the place.

Do you rush?

It’s astonishing to me how many writers use their first page to say: heresmystoryitsgoingtobereallygreat.

If they have a fantasy world, they start to rush into an explanation of how the magic works. If they have (say) a Big Secret – a female character in historical fiction dresses as a man to get work – they want to reveal that secret on page #1.

And – slow down.

Secrets are fun when they wink at you and you have to tease them out. They’re just boring when they’re delivered like six-year-old secrets. (“Hey, Papa, I’ve got a really big secret. Do you want to know what it is? OK, then I’ll tell you.”)

That’s probably enough for this email, but I will say this:

Feedback Friday seems like an incredibly rich way to turn the somewhat abstract insights of this email into practice. There will be LOTS of opportunities for feedback – not just on opening pages but (as with the week coming) on elevator pitches, on query letters, on book covers, on marketing plans, on character descriptions, and so on. If you’re a Premium Member, then please tuck in to the full. We’ll support you the best we can. If you’re not a Premium Member, then please engage anyway.

Intelligent, respectful and constructive feedback is THE gold-standard way to improve your work. So let’s improve it.

Over to you.

Til soon.

Harry