Roasted chestnuts & a glass of mulled cider

My favourite thing?

Well, I have a lot of favourite things, but my favourite for today is when you guys ask super-brilliant questions that make me think … and generate the meat for a cracking email.

And this week, honours are taken by Nigel S, who wrote to say:

Hello Harry,

Can I ask you about warmth in writing?

I have probably read on average two books per week for the last sixty years. (That probably tells you everything you need to know about me.)

Warmth in a story has always fascinated me, and I strive for it in all my jottings. For instance, Stuart MacBride and Harry Bingham have it in spades (Lord, I hate a smoke-blower, don’t you?) while M______ and L______ don’t.

Anyway, try as I might to apply my mighty intellect to it, I can’t identify what it is that does the trick.

So I’d be very grateful if you could give me and the writing world in general your take on why I can read a book about Laz and Roberta in a day, whereas it might take a week’s stay in Three Pines to get the juice.

And that’s an interesting question, right? I’m certain, for example, that JK Rowling’s massive success relies in very large part on her wit and warmth. So yes, you come to her books for the boy wizard and Voldemort and all that. But you stay because of that sense of human generosity at the heart. The warm blanket and the just-right mug of cocoa.

Same thing with Stieg Larsson in a way. If you describe the Lisbeth Salander character – Aspergers, violent, spiky, tattoos, motorbike, abuse survivor, computer geek – you expect someone who is impressive, maybe, but not someone you want to spend a ton of time with. Yet the books themselves do have a sense of warmth at their heart – warmth, not bleakness – and the result is that readers committed to a series, despite its multiple flaws.

So, if warmth is a Good Thing, how do you build it? How do you make it happen on the page?

The honest answer would be: I’m not sure. This email doesn’t offer a properly developed explanation. It offers some first thoughts in response to an interesting question.

But I’ll start by saying that this question particularly chimes with me, because a few years back I was developing my Fiona Griffiths crime series. On the drawing board I had a character and book who seemed deeply unlikable, with a theme that seemed dark to the point of a cemetery midnight:

• Fiona used to think she was dead
• She deals in homicide
• The crime at the heart of book #1 was ugly (human/sex trafficking)
• Fiona’s dad is a crook
• She has no romantic attachments and no historically successful relationship
• At one point in the book, Fiona sleeps in a mortuary. She’s not accidentally locked in. She’s not looking for clues. She just wants to sleep next to dead people.

A book like that might or might not be impressive. But is it something you’d want to read? Is that a character you’d want to return to? Based on that chilly outline, I’d have to say no. (And some publishers did say no, by the way, for that exact reason. The tone of the rejections was roughly: “Wow! We love what you’ve done, but we don’t think readers could resonate with this theme.” In other words: we’re clever, insightful readers and we love your book, but we think that the unwashed rabble out there wouldn’t have our excellent good sense. I don’t need to tell you what I think of that attitude.)

But for the future of my career, the answer absolutely had to be yes. Yes, readers had to love the book and bond to the character. Everything depended on that.

I didn’t want to change my basic outline, but I will say that the aspect of that first FG novel I thought about hardest as I was writing it had to do with the basic question: “How can I make this book feel warm?”

One answer was humour (a tool that JK Rowling used a lot, and Stieg Larsson not at all.) But it’s an easy win. If a book makes the reader laugh, that little splash of sunshine will do a lot.

Another answer, and a really important one for me, is close family relationships. For all Fiona’s mental chaos, and for all the darkness in her head, she loves her family. And they love her. Not in some American, happy-clappy, Thanksgiving TV kind of way. Just in an ordinary family way. Ordinary like this, for example:

We [ie: Fiona, her mother and sister] eat ham, carrots and boiled potatoes, and watch a TV chef telling us how to bake sea bream in the Spanish fashion.

Ant has homework that she wants help with, so I go upstairs with her. The homework in question takes about fifteen minutes. Ant waits for me to give her the answers, then writes what I tell her to.

That snippet shows functional, happy, ordinary relationships. And when Fiona’s life is placed under stress by the events of the story, she ends up calling on her family for emotional and practical help, and the family gives it, generously, without fuss.

That fictional act – placing someone at the heart of a web of loving relationships – somehow snakes outwards from the book and envelops the reader too. The family route works mostly strongly and easily, but your story may not accommodate it. (Harry Potter and Lisbeth Salander, are both in effect orphans, after all.) In such cases, you can build a kind of surrogate family. Ron and Hermione in one instance. Mikael Blomkvist and the Millennium team in the other. It’s the loving warmth thrown out by those relationships that steps in where a family would most naturally be.

But I think my third answer probably runs deepest. It’s this:

Chilliness in a book starts in the heart of your main character.

And what matters here isn’t your character’s situation, or her achievement of love, or the existence of close ties. It’s what she wants. It’s what she strives to attain.

So, yes, my Fiona had difficulty recognising her own emotions. She had never had a proper boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. She kept on making a mess of the relationship that is burgeoning under her nose. Here’s an example:

The restaurant he’s [David Brydon, the prospective boyfriend] chosen is only a few minutes away … but he walks half a step ahead of me, moving a bit faster than I can manage, and he has his chest thrown out and his shoulders pulled back as though he’s a soldier bracing himself for combat. I realise that this is his way of preparing for an all-out assault on Fortress Fi, and I’m touched, though I would slightly prefer it if potential suitors didn’t regard a date with me as akin to entering combat.

It’s possible that I was prickly with him in the wine bar. I sometimes am without knowing it, my habitual default position. Not good when it comes to flaunting those feminine charms.

I determine to do better.

And she does indeed try her very hardest to do better. It’s a clunky, awkward attempt to do better, but it’s genuine. Not just genuine, in fact. It’s heartfelt. This is someone urgently wanting human connection. Here’s an example:

I smile at him when we’re sitting and tell him again that this is lovely. I even go as far as being coaxed into ordering a glass of white wine. I realise that I’m operating as though following instructions from some kind of dating manual, but I’ve found out that that’s usually OK with people. It’s only me who feels weird.

From that point on, things go much better.

And, as it happens, it works. She gets her man. She creates and sustains her first proper romantic relationship.

But it didn’t have to. What mattered wasn’t the achievement of romantic completion, but the desire to find it. And indeed, as the series progresses, readers discovered that the path of true love never did run smooth (and certainly not when you have a series to write and an authorial income to generate.)

And there it is. Great question from Nigel. Three answers: humour, family, and the desire for human connection. Because, as I say, these are opening thoughts, I’ll be interested in your reflections.

So what do you think? What works for you, either as reader or writer? Let’s all cuddle close, and have a Heated But Amicable Debate.