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Last week I said this:

Next week … I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.

What I asked people to do was to write a very short plot summary of their novel, either in 1-2 paragraphs or as bullet points: Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint / Developments, Crisis, Resolution.

Obviously, that kind of treatment is nowhere close to being an actual plan for a book. Writing a plan would take several pages of text, even if you were being quite compressed in your summary. I’ll also add that I pretty much never write a plan; it’s not how I work. It seems to me that a detailed plan is optional; a general sense of shape and purpose is not.

And, OK, it’s all very well performing an assignment, but what is it for? What are the lessons you’re likely to get?

The short answer to that is that you need to test your plot for seaworthiness – and doing that at book length is (a) extremely hard and (b) extremely time-consuming. Asking the key questions of a micro-summary isn’t going to give you all the answers by any means, but it does give you a fast, reliable way of understanding the basics.

Here are some of the things you may well find:

Blandness

Here’s a plot:

Status Quo                           Woman (45) is dissatisfied with her life

Inciting Incident                  Her best friend pressures her to go to a pottery class

Midpoint                               She resists the pottery, but ends up entering a competition, and failing badly

Crisis                                      She decides to give up the class and revert back to her old way of life

Resolution                            Her new friends intervene and make her realise that she now has a group of friends who love her; she’s turned her life around

Now, I hope it’s obvious that something like this genuinely describe an important turning point in someone’s life. But as a novel? It’s hopeless. It’s just too dull, too lacking in bite to be picked up by anyone – agent, publisher, reader. Nearly all novels need a splash of the dark – and losing a pottery competition is not dark.

Scale

Another thing to ask is whether a novel has genuine novel-length scale. So take this example:

Status Quo                           Karob is a prince – the king to be. He’s had a sheltered life and a loud, dominant father

Inciting Incident                  Dragons prey on the northern territories. Defence is the traditional task of the crown prince

Midpoint                               Karob fights the dragons and fails

Crisis                                      The king is ailing and courtiers are moving to prevent Karob from taking the throne

Resolution                            He returns to the north with a larger force and defeats the dragons.

And, OK, that has darkness. But does it have scale? Does that feel like a story that could sustain 100,000 words of prose? At the moment, it certainly doesn’t. It feels more like a middle grade story that might run to 30-40,000 words.

It’s always hard to be sure of these things when giving feedback to others. Is there more to this story than we’re seeing in those bullet points? Maybe.

But if you’re doing the exercise for yourself, you know whether there is or is not meant to be more. And at the moment, that story is just too compact, too simple – too dull – to sustain a whole book. Basically it amounts to: X fights Y and loses, then fights again and wins. A book that can be summarised as briefly as that isn’t really a novel. You have to be sure your outline has enough scale to build on.

Tangles

The last big route to failure is writing a novel that doesn’t know what it is. The first two examples might be hopeless, but at least they know what they’re doing. That’s not always the case:

Status Quo                           Jax (27) is in a job that offers geopolitical risk assessment. Even she doesn’t know what that is and she’s kind of bored. Her last partner broke up with her 6 months ago and she’s wanting to find someone.

Inciting Incident                  Yuri persuades Jax to help with his Azerbaijani import/export business. Jax also meets Luigi, a very good looking Italian personal trainer. Jax’s mother gets ill.

Midpoint                               Yuri is working with the CIA but had KGB roots and Jax isn’t quite sure who she’s helping. Meantime, she’s dating Luigi but he becomes very controlling. Jax can’t get to see her mum, even though the mum has a dementia diagnosis.

Crisis                                      There’s a major shootout in Baku. Jax is wounded. Luigi tells her that she has to stay at home and be an old-fashioned housewife. Jax’s mother goes into a home.

Resolution                            Jax hands over her secrets to MI6, who give her a job as a central Asia analyst. She breaks up with Luigi. She sees her mum comfortably settled.

And – erp? What is that story? Who is it for? Is it a rom com? An action romance? Is there any connection between Luigi and Yuri? Quite how does the mother connect to all this? It’s not that you couldn’t slot a romance into a geopolitical spy story – of course you can – but there’s a theme about coercive control that just doesn’t seem to fit into anything else. It’s like there are three stories here and none of them have ever met before.

You usually get this kind of issue when a writer just wants to write about their chosen subjects and doesn’t take any feedback from the story itself.

Truth

And in the end that brings us to the essential element in this exercise – or really any writing exercise: truthfulness. You need to look at your work with a third-party eye, an unforgiving one. What, really, would an agent say about any of these three submissions, assuming they were being completely honest and not caring about the author’s feelings? They’d say: “boring”, “thin”, and “total mess”.

One of the advantages of an artificial exercise – like this bullet point one – is that it puts distance between you and your work. That distance should help you get as close to the truth as possible.

Pitch

And one more thing:

Do you feel your pitch echoing through your plot summary? You should. If your pitch isn’t there in the DNA, then your pitch is probably just a marketing sticker that you’re gluing on after the fact. That doesn’t work. The pitch IS your book, or should be.

That’s all from me. I’m going to take the rest of August off in terms of emails, but Feedback Friday will run as normal – and we’ll give you some of my greatest hits so you still get your dose of Friday yumminess.

The kids have built a massive fort in the garden, including a toilet (“but only for wees”) and a bath, which is a wheelbarrow full of water. So far, they’ve used a puppy crate, a guinea pig hutch, a ton of fence posts, an umbrella, two brooms, some towels and quite a lot of scrap wood. I’m not allowed to look too closely because if I try, they tell me they’re throw a spear at my head.

I don’t want a spear in my head.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #5 / Tools

Watch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)

Do your assignment:

Tell us what your themes are, and give us a passage (250 words) that shows them in action.

A great assignment, by the way. So get stuck in! Upload the result to Townhouse here.

Til soon.

Harry

The kids are off school. Yesterday was – complicated. And right now, I have seven kids in the house with me as the only (vaguely) capable adult.

So –

A short email today, but one with a useful moral.

On Wednesday night, I did (for our beloved Premium Members) a LIVE EDIT session, in which I took four short pieces of work and started to edit them much as I would if they were my pieces of text.

When I do these things, I don’t pre-plan my edits: the point really is to offer a stream-of-consciousness view into how I approach things. And each time I start one of these webinars, I always wonder if I’ll actually have anything useful to say.

I mean, I can always find trivia – this word repeated, an over-focus on bodily movements or sensations, a tiny muddle as to just how quiet a particular location is. At the outset, those things always seem to offer rather slim pickings. Good to correct, maybe, but perhaps not worth a webinar.

Except – and Wednesday evening was no exception – these little things normally lead to something bigger. So here, for example, is the first paragraph from one of the passages we looked at:

Aside from the weather and the hooting of an owl in the distance, it’s deathly quiet. Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was asleep upstairs made me feel safe somehow, like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Rain beats the roof above me in place of Jon’s footsteps on old floorboards, wind the only other breath for miles.

Now, this was from a really quite good passage and the key emotional transition which followed was well and movingly handled. The author, Rian, stands a decent chance, I think, of writing something which agents will need to give serious consideration to in time.

But? Well, the bit that niggled at me first was that damn owl.

The first sentence here says, “it’s deathly quiet,” albeit that the place isn’t totally quiet because of some (undefined) weather and a distant owl.

Only then, the last sentence says “Rain beats the roof above me.” It doesn’t say “patters lightly and almost without sound”. It says “beats”.

So which is it? Beating rain or deathly silent? It can’t be both.

And then, Jon’s bar is bamboozling too. Is the soundscape of that bar:

a) A comforting buzz?

b) Silent, because Jon is asleep upstairs?

c) Nothing from the bar below, but footsteps from Jon walking around above, presumably after the bar has closed for the night?

The answer seems to be all of the above.

Now, these niggles are – I accept it – utterly trivial. The first sentence said “Aside from the weather,” so it did, if we’re being strict, make some allowance for the rain. And the thing about Jon’s bar? Well, obviously, the soundscape of that bar varied with time of day, but the woman is perfectly capable of remembering each bit of it. We as readers are also capable of figuring these things out.

But these niggles lead to another. The structure of the piece at the moment is this:

1. Deathly quiet here
2. Comforting buzz of bar (past)
3. Me and the forest
4. Jon’s footsteps on floorboards (past again)
5. Wind the only breath

So we loop back twice to Jon, in the space of eighty words. That means that none of these soundscapes can be properly described or absorbed – we’re just shuttling to and fro too often. And what’s the emotional movement here? It’s got a bit lost in the shuttling.

So, on Wednesday, we took these niggles and arrived at this:

It’s quiet here. There’s the sound of rain on the roof, and dripping off trees, and somewhere an owl, hooting unseen. Otherwise, nothing – a forestful of silence.

Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was there, either serving beers or, after hours, moving around on the old floorboards upstairs, made me feel safe somehow. Like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Me, the trees, the owl and the rain.

That’s ten words longer, but clears up the niggles around what exact sounds we’re dealing with. More important, it cleans up the structure: we start with the forest, then we feel a pang for the buzz of the place left behind, then we consider again our solitary state here with the trees and the owls.

In bringing a bit of order to these smaller points, we also get greater emotional clarity. The new passage now shows a flow from external observation (“it’s quiet here!”) to an emotional one (“Wow! I’m really alone here.) That movement – a deepening – goes via a contrast (in terms of sound, and aloneness) with the world the character has just left.

This matters! The character is about to plunge into a howl of pain over her lost baby. The paragraph before that happens needs to set that up just right.

The new passage does just that. It gives us silence – nostalgia – oh crikey, I’m on my own … The whole paragraph is now getting us ready for what follows.

That, roughly, is how editing almost always works.

You start with a fairly low-level worry – in my case it was beating rain vs deathly quiet.

In solving that worry, we found others (was Jon’s bar buzzing or silent or footsteppy?).

And in solving all those things, we got to something that:

a) No longer suffered from those minor niggles, but also

b) Gave us a powerful and emotionally compelling route into the howl of pain which is about to come.

Little things lead to big things. That’s how editing works. That’s why jumping on trivia is almost always important: it opens doors to things that you might not otherwise have sensed and found.

For me, the activity has a free-form quality. Sometimes, I enter my text with a mission. (Turn character A from male to female. Improve setting B. Solve the plot conundrum in chapter X.) Often, though, I just read the text and respond to it.

I find a niggle and tease away at it.

Little things lead to big ones.

The text improves.

Next week, I want to do something a bit similar in terms of plotting. I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #4 / Prose

Watch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)

Do your assignment:

Take a scene. Cut it brutally. Layer it up the way we did in the video. Then present your before and after efforts. (The “after” version should be a max of 250 words, please.)

Upload the result to Townhouse here. 

I’ll be very keen to see the results of both the cutting and the layering up. I’m expecting beauty and wondrousness here, folks. Oh yes, and we’re at the one year anniversary of our Feedback Friday sessions. I’ve loved them. Thanks for participating.

Til soon.

Harry.

I once wrote a book about payroll fraud. (Yawn.) The fraud in question involved some kind of messing about with employee tax deductions. (Snore.) The fraud was perpetrated using online tools for sabotaging corporate databases. (Dull, dull, dull.)

At one level, that book should not possibly have worked. It was like being trapped inside your very worst admin nightmare: dealing with government tax codes AND horrible tech stuff, both at the same time.

Suffice to say, I don’t think the book did fail – or at least, certainly not for that reason. Because I knew that the underlying subject matter was profoundly tedious, I basically avoided it. I mean, I couldn’t avoid it completely, because the crime was the crime, but I never did anything more than basic window dressing. So, for example, a character at one point says this:

“It looks like the basic mechanics of the fraud were initially set up by Kureishi. He installed software that gave external access to payroll. We’re confident he was not the ultimate beneficiary of the fraud. We simply can’t find enough money or signs of heavy spending. And the set-up looks remarkably professional. The fraud involves over a hundred and fifty dummy UK bank accounts. The money siphons via Spain, Portugal or Jersey to Belize. The Belize bank account is fronted by nominees and owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. That shell company in turn is owned by a foundation in Panama.”

That’s pretty much as specific as I ever got. “He installed software” – well, shucks. That doesn’t really say much of anything. Dummy bank accounts, money siphoning to Belize – well, I have no idea how to do that kind of thing and I never got even close to an explanation.

In effect, my aims with speeches like the one I’ve just quoted were threefold:

1. Make the whole crime setup look plausible.
2. Make it look big and meaty – something that matters enough for my character to be deeply committed to the investigation. (I did that partly with the number of bank accounts, but more importantly with corpses – by this point in the book, my Kureishi character was very, very murdered.)
3. Avoid boring the reader with too much technical jargon.

You may not be writing about payroll systems yourself, but you quite likely are writing about something that involves technical knowledge – and if you are, you have some decisions to make.

Where your knowledge is actually interesting, then share it. I also wrote a book about the early oil industry and readers wanted to know how wells were drilled, what happens when you strike oil, what happens when gas leaks from a well, how wildcatting operated in those days, and so on.

Because of the intrinsic interest of the topic, I read a lot about it and shared plenty. Several specific accounts of striking oil in the book were drawn from actual strikes at the time – from huge gushers to small, but highly indicative, indicators that oil was close. Plenty of readers wrote to me saying how much they enjoyed that stuff. The former head of a major oil company wrote to me to tell me that he had an interest in the technology of the early industry and that I’d got my technical detail pretty much right. (Phew.)

But –

The reason I’m writing this email –

But –

Phones. Whatsapp. Messages. Facetime. Emails. Login credentials. Twitter. Who follows who. DMs. Verification issues. Instagram. Lost passwords. Account recovery process.

For all of us now, a lot of our social interaction is mediated through tech and much of that tech is basically horrible and boring. As a matter of fact, I think that one of the reasons why people pick up books specifically is to avoid the specific negatives of tech involvement.

With a book, the attention commitment is long not short – hours, not minutes or seconds. It’s emotional in a broad, deep, complex way, not in a “catty remark on Instagram” way. If we’re reading in print, then we’re doing so because we don’t want a screen in our hand.

All this says: you need to avoid talking about the detail of tech in your book wherever possible. If you need “convincers” – as I did with payroll fraud – then stick them in. But the purpose of those convincers is really just to say “I know this is boring, so can we please agree that I know what I’m talking about, and we can leave it at that?” That means, as short as possible, as little as possible.

You may think that this doesn’t apply to you – perhaps your book is a domestic noir psych thriller, not a book about payroll fraud or the oil industry.

But in fact, domestic noir psych thrillers are precisely the kind of area where this issue crops up.

Compare these two passages:

Tech-led

She looked at her phone and traced the unlock pattern to gain access. She navigated to Whatsapp and checked for unopened messages. There were a dozen or so messages in a school-related chat she was signed up to, but nothing from Emma. She tapped the search icon to bring up messages from Emma and was about to text her, when she saw a notice saying that the user had blocked her messages …

Emotion-led

She checked her messages – and found that Emma had blocked her. Why? Because of the Croissant Incident? But surely not. She’s already apologised for that and Emma didn’t seem like the kind of person to bear a grudge, no matter how covered in golden pastry flakes she might have been …

I hope it’s blisteringly obvious that one is terrible and one is good. My mother could basically understand the second piece of text, but she’d have no idea what the first one was going on about. Now, OK, it’s not your job to write for my mum, but the point is broader. One piece of text places tech-navigation at its centre. The other one places emotion and relationships at its centre.

You need to do the second, not the first.

These comments are acutely relevant to the kind of smartphone technology we all have in our lives now, but they’re also relevant to any kind of Boring Tech – like my payroll fraud.

If you’re writing about something interesting – navigating an ice-breaker, a 1930s gusher, Napoleonic artillery, the newsroom of a contemporary newspaper – then go for it. Find the rich detail and give us that. If you’re writing about something dull, give us the bare minimum and move away fast.

In my oil book, I remember I had a roughneck fall out of an oil derrick, bounce off the tin roof of the power-rig, and lie on the ground saying, “Would someone find a cigarette for this broken-assed sonofabitch?” I didn’t make that bit up: I just took it straight from eyewitness reports at the time.

The real gold? It’s reality – edited.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #3 / Plot

Watch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)

Give me your plot summary, as either:

• Five bullet points (Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint, Crisis, Resolution), or
• 1-2 paragraphs

Either way, stay short. We’re focusing on the basic shape of the plot here; the detail can come later.

I know you’ve already done something towards plot, but I want you to get deeper and more specific this week. I’m looking for a further iteration of the work you’ve already done. If that means sharing something a bit more detailed than I’ve suggested, that’s fine.

Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Everyone welcome.

BONUS FEEDBACK FRIDAY: 250 Words / Live Edit

I’m doing a live feedback event next week, so your task this week is really simple. Premium Members can register for it here. I want, please, 250 words (max) that you really like. Also, title and genre.

I’m going to give live feedback on this stuff next week, so if you don’t want your work torn to shreds in front of a baying mob, please mark it: NO LIVE FEEDBACK.

(Truth is, I only pick work I already quite like and I’m never that mean. But if you don’t want the live experience, then please just tell me so.)

Share your work here.

Til soon.

Harry

Hello writers, we have TWO tasks in this week's email. If you want to take part in this week's Feedback Friday, keep reading to find out how to get involved - Jericho Team

Superquick housekeeping to start off with: My How To Write A Novel in 6 Weeks course kicks off NOW. Anyone taking the courses gets a weekly video, an assignment, and peer-to-peer feedback via Feedback Friday.

The first module (on planning) is free to all. I hope you get stuck in and make maximum use of it. More information in the PSes below about what to do next.

After this first module, you’ll need to be a Premium Member to complete the course. If you’re not a PM and want to take part, check out our membership options here. I hope you join us.

Righto.

And today, I want to start with a simple question: What do you want to get out of writing?

Don’t give me the ‘in your wildest dreams’ answer. We all know what you dream of: agents stalking you, publishers sending you limos with huge bunches of flowers, a bestseller list electrified by your presence, surging crowds at festivals, your own skincare range, Margot Robbie pestering you with requests to be in your movie, Ryan Gosling inviting you to his island birthday bash …

And, OK, I’m sure that’s all bound to happen, but let’s have a sober version of your aspirations too.

If you want to answer just that simple question, then do. We’ve put together a Townhouse forum, and please – everyone, not just Premium Members – get involved. The short version of the question is just this: What do you want to get out of writing?

If you want to be more discursive (and please do!), then you might want to address any of the following questions which seem relevant to your situation:

1. Do you think your basic idea for a book is strong enough?
2. Are you going to finish your book?
3. Do you intend to get help with the book (eg: via a manuscript assessment)?
4. Do you intend to get help with your skills (eg: via a writing course)?
5. If you’ve finished your manuscript, do you think it’s strong enough to market as it stands?
6. What’s your preferred publication outcome: Big 5 traditional publication? Niche trad publication? Digital first publication? Self-pub?
7. What will you do if you get your book out there and agents aren’t interested?
8. What will you do if your self-publish your book and sales are miserable?
9. What financial outcome would make everything worth it to you? Give us a figure.
10. What other factors would make everything worth it? (eg: seeing your book in a bookshop. Holding a book in your hand. Getting some emails from readers.)
11. Does critical acclaim feel important to you?
12. Does feedback from readers feel important to you?
13. Do you intend to write more than one book? If yes, then will you be writing in your current genre or multiple ones?
14. Do you want to make a full-time career as author (ie: earn enough to live on from books alone.)
15. Do you want to make a substantial part-time career as author? (Like loads of the team at JW, in fact.)
16. Does a film / TV adaptation feel important, or is that just fantasy-land stuff for you?

Don’t feel confined to that list. If there’s something I’ve missed that seems relevant, add that into your answers.

And …

Well, when I started writing, I definitely wanted a big 5 publisher. I definitely wanted an agent. I definitely wanted to make meaningful money.

But I think the biggest thing for me was simply being a writer. I’d wanted to be an author since I was about 10 years old; I just always assumed that’s what I’d do. So being a writer for me was mostly about becoming me; anything else would have felt a bit strange, like having been born into the wrong body.

I have had my work adapted for TV. That didn’t make a big difference to me, either emotionally or financially.

I have had my work sold all over the place. That’s been gratifying, for sure, but not in an especially deep way. It’s fed my ego, not my soul, and these days my ego isn’t that fussed either.

I’ve generally had very positive reviews from critics, but, honestly, that means less to me now than it might have done once. I feel that I know reasonably well how good or bad my books are. I’m not massively affected by what some third-party thinks. If someone doesn’t like my book, that’s as likely to be a matter of personal preference as it is to be something more fundamental.

Getting really committed, insightful communications from readers? Well, that’s always been special and it’s become much more frequent in the internet age and (especially) with a bit of self-publishing.

I’ve always enjoyed trad publishing (though it has also, often, frustrated the heck out of me) but I’ve always liked self-pub too (which has been much less frustrating and more reliable in terms of income.)

I like writing fiction and non-fiction, but fiction is definitely harder – a lot harder, in fact.

I definitely want to publish more books, but I don’t have the same fever around it as I used to. (Nor, admittedly, the same financial pressure.)

I’ve never taken a writing course, but I have done courses on self-pub (well worth it) and no book of mine has ever been published without deep, professional editorial input.

So: those, roughly, are my answers.

What are yours?

Write down your answers and actually give them some kind of sense check. If you have things like “Explore merchandise range to accompany my middle grade novel”, then ask yourself how many authors you know who have successfully done this. If your answer doesn’t get further than ‘JK Rowling’, you may want to reconsider things.

The fact is that writing is hard. Getting published is hard. Not getting published is more common than getting published … and getting published in a small way is more common than getting published at scale.

So, what's the point of all this? Well, we're not in the business of daydreaming. I want you to think practically about your writing future. If you have a goal in mind, it's much easier to reach if you

1. know what that goal looks like and
2. have concrete steps that will bring you closer to achieving it.

Ask yourself: what does that journey look like? What can you do today, this very minute, to bring you closer? This could be any number of things but some ideas include: 

• Clearing a set space in your week for writing
• Improving your home-writing set up to remove niggles or distractions
• Finding beta readers (Try Townhouse)
• Getting formal expert feedback (Try a manuscript assessment, but do this only after you’ve worked hard at self-editing your work. It doesn’t pay to rush in.)
• Really structuring what your book is trying to be. Getting specific about things like your elevator pitch, your plot outline, your character plans, and so on. (That means writing things down, by the way. Thinking about these things while walking dogs won’t achieve the same thing.)
• Cultivating a writing community (Feedback Friday is a great place to start)
• Improving your writing craft. Why not dip your toe with this week's How to Write lesson? If there's another area you need bolstering, hit up our Masterclass library (available to Premium Members). There are also more rigorous, structured options like our flagship writing course. It really depends on where you are at and where you want to be.
• Doing the scary stuff. Not sure if your manuscript is ready to be marketed? Try sending it out to agents. See what response you get. Or book an agent one-to-one and ask for direct, truthful feedback

For now though, that first step could be as simple as writing out your answers to the above questions and making sure every goal has a first step you can realistically make in the near future.

Post your writing goals and next steps here. Don't want to share with the wider world? Reply to this post and let me know.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: HOW TO WRITE / MODULE #1 / PLANNING

Watch this video (this is the first lesson in the How to Write a Novel course. It’s free to watch, the rest of the course is for Premium Members)

Do your assignment:

1. Your pitch in <20 words
2. Write 1 short paragraph of plot summary
3. Write 1 paragraph on everything else (notably character.)

Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Everyone welcome.

Til soon.

Harry

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. And yes, the military significance of those landings looms a little larger in Anglo-American eyes than it does in German / Slavic eyes, but still – golly. That invasion involved what was by far the largest invasion fleet in history. In one single day, 133,000 men landed in France, under fire. By the end of June 1944, almost a million men had been put ashore, along with 150,000 vehicles and an infinitude of supplies.

Now, I happen to have one of those little author soft-spots for this bit of history. I wrote a historical novel once about the oil industry, and D-Day featured in the climax of the book. It was all very well to land 150,000 vehicles (in less than a month) – but how were those vehicles to be fuelled? There’s no oil in Normandy and slow-moving oil tankers were desperately vulnerable to attack. So … PLUTO: The PipeLine Under The Ocean. It had never been done before, but, eighty years ago, it was done, because it had to be done. A pipeline unrolled on the ocean bed to feed petrol through to the liberating army. Wow.

I’m always moved by those things, but also – listening to voices and memoirs on the radio – I’m struck by the precision with which ordinary language captures the fleeting moods of history.

If you had people today talking about a similar venture, they’d sound different. They’d use different language, pick out different details, have slightly different humour, and so on.

For example, I heard an account of the moment, written by someone then only 8 or 9. Some American soldiers were camping out in Hampshire. And they had this ‘big bit of lamb stew’ cooked up in ‘great tin pot’. The soldiers (‘very generous’) offered the boy some of their food, and the boy, used to sparse wartime rations, clearly revered the memory of that meal.

My kids are the same age now as that boy then. They might talk about a lamb stew, but they wouldn’t talk about a ‘great tin pot’ and I think they’d be a lot less likely to talk of a ‘big bit’ of stew. And obviously, they don’t even know what ration cards are or were.

Now I say this, with both a narrow focus and a broad one.

The narrow focus is simply this: if you’re writing historical fiction, you need to get as close as possible to the words and experiences of the people who were there. So yes, you need your grand history books: the military histories which tells you about what the US 1st Army achieved, how fast or slowly the British and Commonwealth 2nd Army advanced, and so on.

But that’s background – of secondary value almost. The closer you can get to the texture of life, the better. That means letters and diaries. Scraps of newsreel. Any opportunity you get to hear or read actual dialogue of the era. What did those soldiers eat? Did they have tents? Bivouac bags? Nothing? What? Those things don’t matter much to military history, but they made up the experience of life on the day. How heavy was a Bren gun? How was the ammo for it carried? Did it jam? What noise did it make? The closer you can get to accuracy there, the better. There’s no substitute for as much real-life memoir as you can get.

That’s the narrow focus, but the issue is broader too – one that affects every novelist and, indeed, any memoirist too.

The presence of (actual, or very well faked) authenticity matters hugely.

If you’re writing about, let’s say, ad industry execs in London, or New York, or Paris – do you have their voices right? Do you have their attitudes right?

Another bit of memoir I heard on the radio today came from a (then) young woman who had parachuted into France to support the Resistance. Her job was to transmit coded messages back to England. She landed in a wood, feeling understandably anxious, but her memoir commented, ‘I thought, well, I’m here now, so I might as well get on with it.’

You can just feel the 1940s matter-of-fact spirit oozing from those words. How does a modern-day, urban-elite ad exec talk? What attitudes do they unwittingly convey in everything they say / do / feel? I’m not too sure – it’s not my world – but the perfect ad-land set book will nail those things. The vocab, the attitudes, the minutiae of life.

With historical fiction, the need for a certain kind of precision is clear: you can’t get History wrong. But it’s the same thing with all other story-telling too. You need to be true to your world, not just in big ways (Spitfires? Or F-22s?), but in little ones – great tin pots and the ‘might as well get on with it’ attitudes.

That’s all true, even if your world is utterly imagined. You might be writing a book about a mining colony on Mars, and it would still matter what people eat, what attitudes they evince, what they call a ‘great tin pot’, what kind of footwear they have, and so on.

My mother-in-law was born in Poland in 1942, to a German-speaking (and Protestant) father and a Polish-speaking (and Catholic) mother. She survived, and might not have done. Her family survived, and might not have done. They all, in time, made it to Munich and the glorious, beautiful safety of the American zone. Thank you, D-Day. Thank you, generous American soldiers and their big bits of lamb stew.

Feedback Friday: Catching the mood

This month, we’re going to be tackling projects attuned to specific genres … but will also make sure that the disciplines we focus on will be applicable to most writers.

Today, I’d love you to take a look at one of our hist fic classes – here - on researching your book. That has a huge relevance, of course, to historical writers, but it’ll affect loads of others too. (Even, say, people writing about mining-on-Mars. I mean, what minerals does it have? What are the Mars-specific extraction challenges …? Those things really matter.)

What I want this week:

• Title
• Genre
• 1-2 sentences of context if needed
• 250 words that show your research in action. Everything from tone of voice to the specifics of (guessing, here) Martian molybdenum mining.

The thing that will please my soul here are things like “Well, I’m here now, so I might as well get on with it.” The tone there is just perfect for the age and the historical moment. These things are hard to pin down, but they matter so much …

That’s it. Feedback in Townhouse as per usual. If you aren’t a Premium Member, you can’t access the masterclass. So um, you could join us – or invade France – or make a really big ball out of rubber bands.

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That’s it from me. Post here. 

Til soon.

Harry