The Write with Jericho course no longer occupies these emails – hooray – but it’s still there for Premium Members to enjoy at any time.

And (’pon my word – how we do spoil those fellows) we have a whole new course for Premium Members to feast on: the Crime Writing for Beginners course.

If you’re not a Premium Member, that course is available for a mere £99. But why on earth would you pay that? Become a Premium Member and you can get it for free, tra-la.

But enough of Mere Commerce! The Muse summons us.

Thought One: televising a novel

Now, when my first Fiona novel was adapted for TV, the production company hired a fancy screenwriter to produce a script. In an early draft of that script, there was a direction which ran something like this:

“Fiona remembers her harrowing years in hospital as a teenager.”

To be clear, that wasn’t introducing a kind of flashback moment, where we saw images of the hospital, Fiona as teenager, things that were harrowing, etc. It was just an acting direction. Hey, Sophie Rundle, here’s what we want you to show in your face.

The excellent Ms Rundle was not quite sure how to deliver that moment, and the direction was altered.

Thought Two: novelising a screenplay

OK. Hold that thought, and let’s turn our attention to this (lightly abbreviated) chunk from the script of Casablanca:

Ilsa: But what about us?

Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have – we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.

Rick: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow […]

[Ilsa lowers her head and begins to cry]

Rick: Now, now…

[Rick gently places his hand under her chin and raises it so their eyes meet]

Rick: Here’s looking at you, kid.

Now, if I’m honest, I’m never sure that Casablanca deserves its haloed status as Greatest Screenplay Ever Written. But it’s clearly a more than decent script and this is THE key moment from that script.

And obviously a novel can in principle handle such moments. But not (I hope) like this:

Ilsa said, ‘But what about us?’

‘We’ll always have Paris,’ he answered. ‘We didn’t have – we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.’

‘When I said I would never leave you.’

‘And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow […]’

Ilsa lowered her head and began to cry.

‘Now, now,’ he said, and raised her chin with his hand until their eyes met. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’

That’s the exact same scene, no? Same dialogue, same actions, same content, same everything.

And – the scene is terrible. It’s not moving. It feels perfunctory and limited and mechanical and pointless.

OK, hold that thought too.

(You now have two thoughts in hand, right? One about Sophie Rundle and a difficult-to-execute stage direction. Two about novelising Casablanca. And, OK, you want to go and check out that crime writing course, so you have three thoughts to hold onto. Plus, you’re a writer, so you quite likely also have a cup of tea. Hold steady.)

Thought three: the magic of the reaction shot

Now someone somewhere once said something like this:

The greatest special effect in cinema is the ability to have the star’s face in close-up on a giant screen.

Few of us get to hang out in real life with (say) an Ingrid Bergman at her peak of beauty and acting prowess. But even if we did, normal etiquette would mean we couldn’t just stare. And even if we did, she’d presumably be life-size, not large enough to fill the screen of whatever cinema we might happen to be in.

But screenwriters do get to use Ms Bergman’s face. And that face means that the little screenplay moment works perfectly. Our poor novelist – who had no beautiful giant face to play with – wrote a drab and forgettable version of the same thing.

So what to do?

Well, it all lies in the reaction shot.

On screen, we just need to see a charismatic face doing some Acting. “I’m not just sad, I’m noble and sad. In fact, I’m noble and sad and regretful and loving (and also beautiful and perfectly lit) and you will never forget this moment.”

In the novel, we can’t do that, but we have something more powerful. The interior reaction shot. Cinema can’t handle that Sophie Rundle stage direction – not without some very clunky backstory footage. But a novelist can do so with ease. You want to convey a complex reaction to something? Convey it, buddy. Want to reflect on the past? Go right ahead. Want to tease out the difference between this kind of noble-but-sad feeling and some other sort? You tease away.

And, OK, all this is a long way to say that in a lot of the work I see, writers are too busy rushing forward to deliver a proper reaction shot.

But cinema doesn’t make that mistake: the whole emotional punch of cinema is delivered in two steps:

1. Concoct a plot and characters that result in a character feeling something powerful
2. Show the character having that feeling – up close, on screen.

Your job as a novelist is the same:

1. Concoct a plot and characters that result in a character feeling something powerful
2. Show the character having that feeling – by jumping into their mind and heart and telling us what’s there.

Don’t go to all the hassle of (1) without collecting the revenues that you get from (2). That’s where the gold lies.

A word from our writing guru

I’ll end this cinema-themed email with a quote from that fountain of wise writing advice, Clint Eastwood. He once said:

My old drama coach used to say, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing.

That’s my advice to you. Let your novel stand there a moment. Let your camera rest on the character. What are they thinking / feeling?

Tell us and tell us properly.

Only then should you move on.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Nice obvious task for Feedback Friday this week:

• Find a scene from your novel when you deliver a proper reaction shot. Max of 200-250 words. Include just enough that we know what your character is reacting to – then show us the character’s reaction.

Once you’re ready, post yours here.

That’s it. And I bet that some of you realise you often don’t have reaction shots that last more than a sentence or so. If so, try beefing that moment up and seeing if it works better.

***

That’s it from me. Half-term is over: a relief.

The school has given the kids a project to build a model Viking longship in 3-D. My older daughter has built a ship in papier-maché that will be a full three meters long, by the time its dragon figurehead is finished. And when I say that she has built it, I mean of course that I built it with the most minimal assistance from her.

Til soon.

Harry

Think of feedback like giving a thoughtful gift – you’re offering ideas and suggestions to help make their piece shine even brighter. Here are some helpful guidelines for giving feedback that is both respectful and useful to the writer:

1. Read it all the way through

Before you dive into someone else’s work, read the piece from start to finish. Remember that you’re usually looking at sections of a whole – a whole story, a whole novel, a whole memoir – so some things will not make sense because they are out of context.

Tip: Take your time and let the story sink in on the first read. Don’t rush! The real magic happens on the second read, when you can dig deeper and catch the finer details.

2. Jot down your thoughts (the smart way!)

On your second reading, grab a pen (or use digital comments) and start jotting down your thoughts as you go. Pay attention to what catches your eye. Which lines really stand out? Which bits of dialogue feel authentic?

Example: ‘I loved how you described the city at night. The line, ‘The streets hummed with secrets,’ really stuck with me – so vivid!’

Keep an eye out for any moments that made you pause or reread. If the flow was interrupted or something didn’t quite click, note it as a question in the margins.

Example: ‘Why does the character suddenly react this way in the middle of the scene? Is there something we missed earlier that explains the shift in tone?’

Tip: Turn your feedback into a dialogue, not a monologue. Us writers love a good ‘why’ to ponder.

3. Offering constructive feedback: helping the work shine

When it’s time to organise your thoughts, remember you’re providing valuable suggestions to help the writer improve. Here are some ideas on what to focus on:

• Voice: Does the character’s voice feel authentic? Are they consistent throughout the piece?
• Originality: What’s unique about the piece? Does it stand out? What makes it special?
• Flow: Is the piece smooth?
• Dialogue: Does the dialogue sound natural? Are the characters speaking the way they would in real life?
• Character Development: Are the characters growing or evolving in a way that makes sense?
• Tension: Is there enough tension to keep us hooked?

4. Start with first impressions

Now that you’ve taken some notes, it’s time to get to the heart of the feedback. What’s your immediate reaction to the piece? Sum it up in a few lines to let the writer know what you took away from the work and give them a great starting point for their revisions.

Example: ‘This is a touching scene between two old school friends who have drifted apart. The setting feels nostalgic, and there’s a sense of looming tension throughout.’

5. Highlight the strengths (give credit where it’s due)

Next, take the time to point out the things that really worked. The writer will be grateful to hear about the things you loved, like the voice, the pacing, or how the character’s journey is unfolding.

Example: ‘The voice in this piece is so strong – it really pulls you in and makes you care about what happens next.’

Tip: Remember comments such as, ‘I think this part really works!’ is just as valuable as a suggestion for improvement.

6. Suggest areas for growth (no pressure, just possibilities)

Feedback should feel like a warm cup of tea, not a cold slap in the face. Avoid vague comments like ‘I didn’t like it.’ Be specific about what could be clearer or more engaging, and offer constructive suggestions. Think of your feedback as a collaborative brainstorming session to strengthen the piece, not rewrite it.

Example: ‘The dialogue between characters A and B was great, but I didn’t quite understand why Character B would say that. Maybe adding a bit more context could help clarify their motivation?’

Tip: Think before you type, and always consider how your words will make the writer feel. A little kindness goes a long way.

7. Wrap it up with encouragement

End your feedback on a positive note, reminding the writer of their strengths and encouraging them to keep going. Writing can be tough, so leave them feeling motivated.

Example: ‘Great work overall – I think you’re onto something really powerful here! With a little more refinement on Character A’s motivation, this could be amazing. Keep at it!’

8. Receiving feedback (it’s not about you, it’s about the work!)

Don’t take criticism personally; it’s not a rejection of you or your abilities. We’re all here to help your writing grow, not to judge you. Stay open to suggestions, but only take what resonates with you—leave what doesn’t. Not all feedback will be a perfect fit for your piece!

Why? Because it is week four of our Write with Jericho course, and therefore the final week of the course. Premium Members will be sad because WWJ is drawing to a close, but they will also be happy because there are a host of other courses they can relish – and because new courses will be popping up all through this year like mushrooms in a damp October. 

And yes, non-members will have an extra sadness because they’ve missed so much excitement of late… Except that they know doing this one small thing will give them abiding and highly cost-effective joy. 

(Also: if you’re a non-member and want to enjoy week one of Write With Jericho for FREE, then go on. Enjoy it. It’s open to all.)

In this week’s final lesson, my colleague Sophie Flynn is teaching about showing & telling, which is a topic that kinda drives us mad at JW Towers, because so many people get it wrong.

The rule is “show, don’t tell,” and it’s a good rule. I like it. It’s always helpful to have at the back of your mind.

But it’s also a terrible rule, because it’s so often false.

Sophie gives an example of this.  

Telling: “It was now midday.”

Showing: “The short hand was already more or less pointing at the twelve and Josie saw with panic rising in her throat that the long hand was now all but upright too.”

That second version is terrible in so many ways it’s hard to count. For one thing, it’s mystifying. It’s so obvious what “it was now midday means”, whereas the second sentence needs a kind of anxious decoding… And even once decoded, it leaves the reader with a slight well, that was weird feeling. 

Of course, the second version is also far baggier and less efficient than the first. What’s more, it still uses telling, because it tells the reader that poor old Josie – trapped as she is in a terrible novel – has panic rising up her throat. On a strict show-don’t-tell model, you’d have to somehow show that panic rising. How you’d go about doing that, I just don’t know.

So, the Idiot Version of the rule is just plain false.         

In a way, I’d prefer it if we replaced that formulation with a simple command to dramatise. Suppose Jane Austen had written the following:

Telling: “Mr Darcy proposed to Elizabeth Bennet, but she refused him with some asperity.”

That’s a perfectly accurate account of one of the most famous scenes in English literature – but also quite clearly a terrible replacement for the scene that Jane Austen actually wrote.

Dramatic action needs to unfold in what feels like real time to the reader. Everything else can just be neatly stitched in with brief but accurate snippets of telling.

I won’t talk about this more – Sophie does all that in her course video – but I’ll do again what I’ve done throughout these Write With Jericho emails and just take a look at what one of my own scenes does. I’ll use the same scene as I used last week which, if you remember, I just picked at random.

So here we go again. The scene itself is in bold. My comments are in italics. Where possible, I’ve shortened the text for brevity.

Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.

This is telling: Fiona’s swift summary of something that isn’t that interesting and doesn’t need to detain the reader for long.

I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’

That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.

‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’

This is showing – dialogue always is. Even here, though, Fiona doesn’t try to show that her statement was a a stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. That’s not something that can be easily shown. It’s not dramatic. So she just tells it in a perfectly straightforward manner.

I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.

This is still probably showing. We’ve dropped the direct speech, but Fiona is summarising reasonably accurately what she actually said.

‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’

‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’

‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’

Dialogue = showing. This is the dramatic heart of this (tiny) scene. But just feel how flat the scene would be without this dialogue at its heart. The heart of ANY scene should be showing, That’s where the drama is.

He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.

His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.

And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards… even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental…

Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.

All telling.

But there’s absolutely no way to show this past history without diving into entire chapters of pointless backstory. Those chapters would have murdered any forward momentum in the plot, whereas three or four paragraphs of reflection work perfectly fine – especially because the reader will by this point be very curious about that past of Fiona’s. (They’ll still be curious, because Fiona still hasn’t talked about The Big Thing that makes her the way she is.)

Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.

‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’

‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’

Back to showing.

It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.

Back to telling.

REFLECTIONS

In a way, there’s not much to reflect on this week. For me, two things stand out:

1. The movement between showing and telling is constant and seamless. A reader wouldn’t remotely notice the movement from one to the other.
2. The dramatic heart of the scene is shown – in this case through dialogue, but you could imagine something purely physical instead, a fist-fight, for example.

Really, the choice between showing and telling is a choice between Efficiency (telling) and Drama (showing.) 

Altering the reader to the fact that it’s midday? Probably better told. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennet? I’d show that if I were you.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Once again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. Sophie has asked you to:

• Rewrite a scene from your novel or non-fiction project, focusing on when to show and when to tell.
• Choose 250 words of this scene and share the before and after over on Townhouse. 

Once you’re ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me for this week. 

Til soon,

Harry

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so we’ve prepared this short survey that will allow you to share your views with us in just a few clicks. Please do fill it in, if you can!

You don’t have to be a Premium Member to do this, but we ask you to let us know whether you are or are not as part of the poll. This is because the information will be useful when we analyse the results.

Many thanks in advance to those of you who complete the survey. Everything we learn about members of our community is valuable, and helps the Jericho Writers team to ensure we keep providing what you need.

And why? Because it is Week #3 of our Write with Jericho course. (Which is free and exclusive to Premium members.)

And just because we love ALL of you not just our lovely Premium Members, you can catch the replay of lesson one of the course for free. Enjoy the mighty Becca Day on adding BOOM to your scenes.

This week is all about dialogue and subtext and internal reflection, which are all things that are vast fun to play with and also vastly effective on the page.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve beaten one of my scenes to death, so no more of that. Instead, I’ve picked up another scene from the same book. As before, I’ve chosen this at random – literally just moving my cursor at random through the text until it plopped onto some meaningful dialogue.

So: let’s review this little scene thinking about subtext. And internal monologue. And what the spoken words tells us about the two characters involved.

The scene is set in Fiona’s father’s study-cum-lair. Her dad is a former criminal, but charismatic and warm towards his family. Fiona’s in a bad head-place. She’s just been physically assaulted in her own home and has returned to her parents’ place for a sense of security. This is now late in the evening.

Bold text is from the scene. My comments in italics. I’ve shortened the text here and there, just for brevity.

Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.

That is: the scene opens neutrally. Whatever her dad is talking about has no relevance to the story.

I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’

That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.

‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’

Now, there’s quite a lot of code going on here. The surface text is clear. Fiona says, “Should I get a gun?” Her dad takes that thought and remodels it as, “Oh, you want to become an armed officer?” (In Britain, police officers don’t routinely carry firearms.)

But there’s also subtext.

Fiona knows damn well that her father was (or is?) a criminal who may well have used illegal firearms in the past. So is her ‘blurted’ thought really just the expression of a woman in shock? Or is it a trial balloon sent up to see what her father might offer her?

And then the dad: he’s no shrinking violet when he comes to violence, but he (deliberately?) turns aside from Fiona’s obvious meaning to explore a legal / official way in which she might get access to a weapon.

I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.

Notice here that there’s some implied dialogue which is just summarised, rather than written out in full. Rotating between direct speech and indirect speech is a way to keep the rhythm of your scene nicely varied. It’s also just quicker: Fiona’s backtracking would probably have taken up more page space than this quick summary.

Note that the dialogue has reversed already. First, she says, “I want a gun” and then she says, “No I don’t.” Fiona may be in shock, but she is very smart, very strategic. What is going on here?

‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’

But her dad isn’t dropping the idea, even though she just told him to. But he’s shifted it from, ‘Oh, you want a gun at work?’ to ‘Oh, you want one at home?’

The gun idea has become a little more personal, a little less official.

And this former gangster is saying he’d ban all handguns – really? Or is this cautious man, who has a police officer daughter, just playing things extremely safe in the event that someone was recording his words?

‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’

Fiona is now steady with the ‘Oh, no, I don’t really want a gun’ message. But she did put the idea out there. And she did blurt the thought to perhaps the only person she knows who might be able to lay his hands on an illegal handgun. So how real is her denial?

‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’

Her dad has now crept from ‘armed officer’ to ‘licensed shooting range’ to ‘are you in trouble?’ He often uses a kind of burble of white noise – happy, positive chat – to disguise his strategies, and he does so here. But he’s saying: (A) don’t take risks, and (B) are you worried about something? That’s like any dad to any daughter … except that she’s a police officer and he’s a (former?) gangster.

He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.

His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.

And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards.  … even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental. …

Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.

This is quite a lot of internal reflection that makes sense of the current pause. And this is a lot of revelation: more information than we’ve ever had on the father / daughter relationship during her troubled teenage years. Because the reader STILL doesn’t know what Fiona’s illness is, this scrap of text will be carefully scrutinised for any clues. And it emphasises her dad’s protective nature. And she just asked and then un-asked for a gun. What does a protective and criminally inclined dad do with that request/not-a-request?

Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.

‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’

‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’

This is a bland ending. Except that the subtext is still here. After all, the gun question hasn’t really been resolved. And Fiona could have chosen to respond to the ‘Are you worried?’ question, but she didn’t. If she had said – credibly – ‘no, I’m not worried’, then maybe the whole gun question could have been genuinely laid to rest. If she had said, ‘yes, I am worried’, then it would have looked like she was asking her criminal father for the use of a weapon.

But – both parties just evade the question. Lay it to rest with platitudes.

It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.

And – we’re done. ‘I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.’: that suggests some emotional issue has been settled … but we’ve just had a bit of dialogue that raised an issue – then denied it – then evaded it. What’s been settled?

Well, at this stage, the reader doesn’t know. But before too long, Fiona’s dad sends a workman round to her house to fix some cupboards that barely needed fixing. The workman chatted as he worked. In the course of that chatter, he mentions an unlicensed shooting range and gives Fiona directions on how to find it.

Fiona does indeed drive to the firing range at night and finds a gun laid out on a bale of straw. With bullets. She fires off a hundred or so rounds, trying to get the feel of the weapon. Then an unnamed man arrives, gives her some basic instruction in how to shoot. She leaves the range with the gun and ammo.

And by the end of this firing range scene, we finally know how to interpret that father-daughter gun conversation.

Fiona came to her gangster-dad and said ‘I want a gun.’

But gangster-dad can’t say to his police-officer daughter that, sure, he can find handguns no problem, so he evades the question.

Fiona, being a police officer, has to deny her own request, so she does – repeatedly.

The gangster-dad tests out various neutral options, none of which get an, ‘Oh yes, that’s what I meant’ from his daughter, so he asks her if she has fears for her safety.

She can’t say yes, because that would be like affirming that she wants a gun, so she evades. But she hasn’t said, ‘no, I’m not worried’, so gangster-dad comes away with three messages: (A) his daughter is afraid, (B) she wants a gun, (C) she wants an illegal, deniable weapon, because if she didn’t, they wouldn’t have had to go through that whole rigmarole.

And because gangster-dad loves his daughter and is very good at what he does, before too long a handgun is put into Fiona’s possession … but via a route that can’t possibly connect back to her the man who put it there.

REFLECTIONS

If you scan the italics and the bold above, you’ll see there’s way more of the former. And the beautiful lesson there is that subtext is much richer and more encoded than the text itself. To unravel the subtext, we need to spend more time and words than was present in the text itself.

And how enriching this all is!

A beautiful and unexpected plot strand is surfaced by this little bit of dialogue. (And of course, this illegal weapon ends up being used in the book’s climactic shootout.)

And our understanding of both characters are transformed by this little scene. Not necessarily during the scene itself – but once the handgun is produced, and we reconsider the dialogue that prompted its production, we realise that both these two characters are very strategic, very risk-averse – and vastly effective. Fiona asked for a handgun and her dad supplied one. And the two of them secured this outcome without ever saying anything that the Chief Constable him- or herself could take issue with. This is the first time in the series we see quite how subtle and potent Fiona’s dad is. It’s also the first time that we see quite how risk-averse he still is, even with his criminal past (probably) behind him. The whole incident adds a darkness, intrigue and depth to both characters … still without either of them having said anything so remarkable.

That’s the beauty of subtext and the beauty of dialogue. I love everything about writing, but if I could only go on a date with one aspect of it, I’d take Dialogue out to dinner, in her shimmering green gown and unreliable smile.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Once again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho Course this week. Laura has asked you to:

Share 300 words from your scene, making sure to incorporate subtext and internal dialogue. You’ll get extra points the richer and yummier your subtext is. Once you’re ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me. I shall wear a smoking jacket in royal blue and bring with me a deck of marked cards and a two-headed coin.

Til soon.

Harry

This week is officially The Best Week of the Course, because it’s the one where I get to tell you about adding atmosphere to your scenes. I don’t want to go over everything I talk about in the course video, but I do want to pick out one small – but tremendously powerful – technique that you can use pretty much anywhere and for pretty much anything.

The idea is to find descriptions – of people, of places, of moods, of anything – that are both literal, physical descriptions AND suggestive of something emotional or personal or even some kind of foreshadowing. Descriptions like this are acceptable to the reader because they’re just literal, right? They’re conveying useful information. But because they also smuggle a whole lot more into the scene, they enrich it vastly.

Last week, I just took one of my scenes and checked it against Becca’s “a scene must develop questions” template. This week I’ll do much the same. I’ll take the exact same scene as we looked at last week and pick out any descriptive language that straddles something physical / literal, and something more suggestive too.

Bold text comes from the actual scene. Italics are my comments. If you remember, the scene last week involved Fiona meeting a dodgy ex-cop, getting a key to a suspect’s home, and entering that property (illegally). Fiona finds a stack of presumably illicit cash, then gets quickly out of the house.

OK. Here goes:

Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.

Does this count? I think it probably does. On the one hand, this is a very literal description of a street. But also – the speed bumps are emphasising a modern safety-consciousness, and the cars stand ‘neat’ in their driveways. Both observations suggest that in this environment, people are cautious and law-abiding. They don’t drive too fast and they park their cars with a rectilinear exactness.

Now that clearly doesn’t describe Fiona at all – the reader already knows her. So really, this description is, yes, picking out some simple physical details, but it’s also telling us, “Fiona does not fit here.” Again, we already know that Fiona isn’t the backing-down type, so if she enters a cautious and law-abiding environment, whatever happens next is likely to be the exact opposite.

In effect that tiny bit of description is foreshadowing the darker material to come – like writing, ‘it was quiet, almost too quiet’, only not a terrible cliché.

There’s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up

‘Unloved’, as applied to a car, presumably just implies rust-spots and the like. But the car’s owner – dodgy ex-cop Brian Penry – hates himself enough that he stole enough cash to get himself caught and (soon) jailed. We learn shortly that Penry even used the stolen money to buy himself a piano that he never played. So it’s not just Penry’s car that’s unloved, right? It’s him.

He gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half-sunlight.

Why ‘half-sunlight’? I mean, yes, that’s a description of a part-sunny, part-cloudy day. But this whole part of the scene is on the edge of something. Just as the key is in half-sunlight, so too Penry is preparing to unlock part, but not all, of what Fiona needs to know.

And Fiona is only half-sunlit herself. The sunny part is that of a clever detective doing her job. The very-much-in-shadows part is that she’s about to enter a house illegally and without her boss knowing.

A little later, Penry ‘half-smiles’ at Fiona, then ‘half-salutes’ her. This whole scene is teasing, not committed. The whole scene is teetering on the verge of something – until Fiona enters the house, and then the tone darkens decisively.

The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army.

This is a bit more fanciful than anything we’ve had so far – the first time anything feels writerly in the scene. And again, it offers a description that does dual work. The sunlight fully occupies the space (so we’ve moved away from half-light to full-light. Even my pedant-brain doesn’t mind that though: light conditions can change.) In literal terms. I guess we’re being asked to imagine a scene sun-drenched and simple. But the ‘invading army’ is a totally extreme image suggesting foreboding and the threat of violence. So we have quite a peaceful scene (a neat suburban road in sunshine) and something almost recklessly violent alongside.

There’s been an ‘is it or isn’t it?’ type equivocation in the scene so far, and this description merrily sits tosses fuel onto both sides of the fire. ‘Oh, yes, it’s peaceful, all right. Look at the speed bumps and the sunlight. But, yeah, this whole thing is going to blow up in a second, THERE’S AN ENTIRE ****ING ARMY RIGHT HERE.’

If you said that thing directly, it would just seem nuts. But metaphors play by different rules; that’s why they’re fun.

I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.

I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before.

At one level, this is saying something simple about opening a door and feeling surprised. But – this is Fiona – the imagery sometimes goes way over the top. Why is this like a fairy story? I don’t completely know, in all honesty, but I think it’s that there’s been a sense of unreality in this scene so far. The neat suburban close should not contain darkness and terror, but there is a sense of something very dark lurking close. So there’s a contest between apparent reality and lurking (but imagined?) darkness. The fairy story image makes that explicit.

In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.

On the one hand, this is just a description of flies. On the other hand, this refers back to the invading army and the possibility of violence. Because we’re only dealing with flies, we can suggest a lot of violence without breaking the rules of the actual place we’re in.

[After Fiona finds the illicit cash and exits the house] I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stairs [when she was talking happily with her new boyfriend]. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.

The sunshine twins: it was sunny in the close before Fiona entered the house, but there’s no reference to sunshine now that she’s come out. So the ‘sunshine twins’ is a reference to love and happiness – a phrase she used when we had the scene on the stairs with her boyfriend – but it’s also a reference back to how the world was before she found the dodgy cash. In effect, when Fiona says ‘I can’t find [the sunshine twins] anywhere now’, she’s saying that she can’t go back to the past boyfriend-happiness state OR the sunny street of ten minutes ago, before she had irrevocably entered a house illegally and found the cash.

This passage strongly hints that the consequences of leaving that sunny state may well involve something quite dark and dangerous. And of course, the novel does start to tip into an ever darker mode from here on.

REFLECTIONS

Last week, I said:

‘A lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,

But the only advice worth anything is advice that helps you solve problems in your writing. So when I read or listen to advice, I always ask: does this actually describe what I personally do when I’m writing well? Does this advice actually generate insights that will help me when I get stuck?’

And honestly, I think if you took the literal-but-not-really-literal element out of my writing, you’d lose a really big chunk of what makes it worthwhile.

The technique is so rewardingly simple: ‘Cars neat in their driveways’? Any idiot can come up with that, right?

You just need two things to make this approach work for you.

One, you need a ‘handbrake off’ approach to your writing. A willingness to put near-nonsense images into your work. (Sunlight like an invading army? That’s ridiculous. Welsh sunlight is never like that, but try it. Write it down. See if it fits.)

Two, you need the judgement to figure out what works and what doesn’t. That’s a matter of gut feel rather than the kind of analysis we’ve just done here. I honestly never thought about this scene in this hyper-analytical way until just now. I did bring a kind of gut feel test to every sentence, though. That’s usually enough.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. I asked WWJ students to do this:

Share 250 words from your scene. I’m looking for:

• Atmosphere / physical description
• Some observation (or action) which bridges the physical & the emotional
• Everything 100% consistent with the character.

Because this email has been all about the middle one of those bullet points, I want you to make sure that anything you share has at least one example of that technique. If you want more background, then my course video will explain all. Once you’re ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me. I am as hungry as a boar and as lean as a pencil. I don’t know why.

Til soon.

Harry

But a book is just a chain of scenes, right? And yes, it’s a carefully sequenced chain, but each scene has its own story and its own structure.

Write with Jericho

Now, as you probably know, as part of our MAGA policy (Make Authors Great Again), we’re launching a new-and-improved version of our Write with Jericho course. Lesson One – Making Each Scene Purposeful – drops this week, led by my colleague (and psych thriller author), Becca Day. Next week, I’ll be teaching about building atmosphere in the scene. My colleagues (and authors) Sophie Flynn and Laura Starkey will also lead lessons.

The course is free to all Premium Members and the above link tells you more about how to participate. It also tells you what to do if you’re not.

So: take the course, listen to Becca, and think about scenes.

How one scene works

Now, I’m not going to repeat all the things that Becca speaks about, but what I do want to do is to take one short scene and see what it’s doing in terms of:

1. Opening with some questions
2. Answering those questions and replacing them with others
3. Deepening and complicating things

The scene – which I’ve chosen literally at random from Talking to the Dead – is one where Fiona arrives at the home of a man called Huw Fletcher. She suspects him of real wrong-doing, but knows he’s missing. She doesn’t have a way to get into the house … but she does have a strange kind of friend/enemy relationship with a bent copper, named Brian Penry.

The bold text is the scene itself. The italics are my comments. I’ve made some minor edits for the purposes of brevity.

Modern brick houses, double-glazed and comfortable. Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.

The scene opens with several questions. One, what’s happened to Fletcher? Two, how does Fiona expect to get into a house when she has no means of entry and no search warrant? And three, what’s in the house?

Nothing remarkable about any of it, the house or the street, except that there’s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up in front of Fletcher’s address, window wound down, and Brian Penry’s darkly haired arm beating time to some inaudible music.

I’m not surprised to see him. I don’t altogether know what the dark lines are that connect Rattigan, Fletcher and Penry – though I’ve got my ideas – but [I had ways to send signals to him and did what I could.]

I wasn’t sure that any of that would bring Penry, or what I’d do if it didn’t. But I don’t have to worry about that. Here he is.

Penry gets out of the Yaris and leans up against it, waiting for me.

OK, so a new question now jumps out at us: what is Brian Penry’s connection with any of this? As far as the reader’s been concerned, he’s under investigation for an entirely different crime. But notice also that one of the questions we started with – how does Fiona get into this house? – already feels different with Penry’s presence here.

‘Well, well, Detective Constable.’

‘Good morning, Mr Penry.’

‘The home of the mysterious Mr Fletcher.’

‘The mysterious and missing Mr Fletcher.’

Penry checks the road. No other cars. No other coppers. ‘No search warrant.’

‘Correct. We’re making preliminary enquiries about a reported missing person. If you have any information that might be related to the matter, I’d ask that you disclose it in full.’

This is fencing, and it feels like it. Neither party is saying what they actually think or feel. But notice that Penry is now making that question about access to the house explicit. He’s basically saying, “You can’t legally enter that house because you don’t have a search warrant.” And he’s right. That question is now centre stage.

‘No. No information, Detective Constable.’ But he gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half-sunlight. ‘I want you to know that I have nothing to do with any of this. I made some money that I should not have made. I did not report some of the things that I should have reported. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up the way that idiot fucked up.’ He equals a jab of the index finger equals Huw Fletcher.

I reach for the key.

He holds it away from me, polishes it in a handkerchief to remove prints and sweat, then holds it out. I take it.

Now both our starting questions get attention. Penry for the first time acknowledges that he is in some (still mysterious) way linked to Fletcher. That’s the first time two major story strands have been formally connected in the book. And the question about access – well, he has a key. Him wiping prints off the key emphasise the not-very-official nature of what’s happening.

‘Time to find out what kind of idiot you aren’t,’ I say.

Penry nods. I’m expecting him to move, but he doesn’t, just keeps leaning up against the Yaris and half smiling down at me.

‘You’re going in there alone?’

‘To begin with, yes. Since I am alone.’

‘You know, when I was a young officer, a wet-behind-the-ears DC, that’s what I’d have done too.’

‘Junior officers are required to use their initiative in confronting unforeseen situations,’ I agree. I don’t know why I start speaking like a textbook to Penry, of all people…

The access question is solved by the key, but that question is instantly replaced by this one: are you going in there alone? That’s partly a safety question (is it safe in there?), but it’s also a legality one. Fiona doesn’t have a warrant. Does she intend to break the law?

Penry says, ‘You’re like me. You know that? You’re like me and you’ll end up like me.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Not maybe. Definitely.’

‘Can you even play the piano?’

‘No. Not a single bloody note. Always thought I’d like to, but I get a brand-new piano in the house and I never touch it.’

‘That is like me,’ I nod. ‘That would be just like me.’

Penry is now saying, “Yes, you will go in there illegally and you’ll end up like me – a bent copper who’s about to be sent to prison.”

When Penry stole money, one of the things he bought with it was an upright piano, which Fiona saw earlier at his home. The non-playing of the piano shows how pointless the thefts were. Penry destroyed himself for no gain, and is telling Fiona that she’ll do the same. It’s not quite clear if Fiona even disagrees.

So now we have a new question – and one much bigger than those we started with – which is: can Fiona manage her future in a way that doesn’t destroy her? And, in fact, because we know she’s about to enter the house illegally, the question has edge. It looks like she is on the path to self-destruction.

His half-smile extends into a three-quarters one, … then vanishes. He gives me a half-salute, slides back into the Yaris and drives off, slowly because of the speed bumps.

So the Penry-related questions are closed off (for now). The questions about this house-entry loom large.

The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army. There’s just me, a house and a key. My gun is in the car, but it can stay right where it is. Whatever’s in the house isn’t about to start a fight, or at least I hope it isn’t.

I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.

I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before. At some point, this particular tale has to come to an end.

This is a pause, but it’s weaponised. The invading army, the gun, the fight – all those words add menace to this moment. In a somewhat metaphorical way, the story is telling us that things are starting to turn serious. The stakes are rising.

The house is . . . just a house. There are probably twenty other houses on the same street that are exactly like it, near as dammit. No corpses. No emaciated figures of runaway shipping managers chained to radiators. No weapons. No stashes of drugs. No heroin-injecting prostitutes or little girls with only half a head.

OK. So far, so nothing. But there’s no release of tension. Slightly the opposite. The reader knows that something’s about to happen – there’s been too much made of this house entry for there to be nothing inside.

I tiptoe round the house, shrinking from its accumulated silence. I’ve taken my jacket off, and wrap it round my hand whenever I touch handles or shift objects.

I don’t like being here. I think Brian Penry is right. I’ve got more of him in me than of, say, David Brydon [a very upright police officer, and Fiona’s first proper boyfriend]. I wish that weren’t true, but it is.

Another reminder that Fiona is acting illegally, and that her future is in doubt. That question feels even sharper now. Fiona’s two possible futures are personified: the upright Mr Brydon, and the self-destructive Mr Penry.

In the bedroom, there is a big double bed, neatly made with white sheets and a mauve duvet cover.

In the bathroom, just one toothbrush. All the toiletries are male.

In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.

More stillness. More waiting for whatever The Thing is that’s about to show its face. But also – those dead flies. A little drip of reminder about the darkness that lies here.

In the kitchen, I open cupboards and drawers, and in the place where tea towels and placemats are kept, there is also cash. Fifty-pound notes. Thick wodges of them. Held together with rubber bands. The drawer below holds bin liners and kitchen foil, and even more bundles of notes. These ones are stacked up against the back of the drawer, making multiple rows. A little paper wall of cash. With one finger, and still through my jacket, I riffle one of the bundles. Fifties all the way down.

Ah! Here’s the thing. That third question – what’s in the house? – is now fully answered. But that also means it’s instantly replaced by a “and what are the consequences?” type question.

I don’t like being here at all now. I don’t like being Brian Penry. I want to go back to plan A, which was to practise getting ready to be Dave Brydon’s new girlfriend. To experiment with my putative new citizenship of Planet Normal.

I close the drawer and leave the house. The lock clicks shut behind me. I find an old terracotta flowerpot in the garden and stow Penry’s key underneath it.

OK, so we’re done with questions about the house. The questions about Fletcher remain, but now he’s not just missing. He’s a missing person with tons of surely illicit cash in his home. But what about Fiona? She shouldn’t have gone in there. She did. She found something which her less rule-breaking colleagues surely need to know about.

Back in my car, I find that I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stairs. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.

I call the Newport police station. It’s all I can do, and I feel relieved when the silence is ended.

OK, the scene – which has been low-key emotionally – ends with some big emotions. Fiona is a long way now from ‘the sunshine twins’. The darkness of these crimes is enclosing her.

But she does at least call her police colleagues. She’s doing something to restore legal / official order to affairs.

But notice what’s happened to our opening questions. They were:

1. What’s happened to Fletcher?
2. How does Fiona expect to get into the house?
3. What’s in the house?

The first of those questions is still a big Don’t Know – but the question has become deeper and darker as a result of what’s just happened.

Question 2 has been answered, but it’s been replaced a much bigger and more interesting one: “Will Fiona destroy herself the same way as Penry did?”

Question 3 has been answered, but it’s been replaced by a “What the hell is going on with Fletcher?”

And notice two more things before we finish:

1. The Fiona / Penry relationship has just become deeper and more complicated. In this little scene, they found a kind of kinship, but based around Fiona’s capacity for self-destruction. That’s interesting – but we also want to know how that strand plays out in the future.
2. The stakes have risen. Although this scene was very quiet, there was an invading army, twelve corpses (only flies yes, but still symbols of death), and Fiona seems close to collapse.

The story after this scene ends is more complicated, darker and deeper than it was before And this was a short scene. And nothing much actually happened: a man gave a woman a key. And she found some cash in a drawer. That’s not much by way of actual action.

Reflections

A lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,

But the only advice worth anything is advice that helps you solve problems in your writing. So when I read or listen to advice, I always ask: does this actually describe what I personally do when I’m writing well? Does this advice actually generate insights that will help me when I get stuck?

And, without talking about everything that Becca discusses, I have to say that, yes, her insights described exactly what was happening in this scene. Not just that, but it was surprising to me to see how mobile the scene-questions were. How they changed, not even from page to page, but every few paragraphs. That’s presumably why good writing feels alive, mobile and unpredictable, and bad writing feels stagey, dull and dead.

Anyhow: I hope you enjoy the Write with Jericho course. More info below if you need it.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

No feedback from me this week. Becca takes over. Her Lesson One video (available to Premium Members only) contains an assignment to do and upload to Townhouse. In addition to feedback from your peers, there might even be a chance of getting feedback from Becca. If you aren’t a Premium Member, then you can sign up, and join the course, immediately and for free.

***

That’s it from me.

Til soon.

Harry

Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing. 

So. 

Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back. 

In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel. 

We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story. 

Here’s one way: 

Direct statements of emotion 

Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger. 

Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader. 

More complicated but still direct statements 

Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain. 

That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing. 

Physical statements: inner report 

Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter. 

Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue. 

Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.

Physical statements: external observation 

Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets. 

Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …” 

Dialogue 

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …” 

Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better. 

Direct statement of inner thought 

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …” 

Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter? 

The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written: 

Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy … 

That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works. 

Memory 

Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo. 

That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part. 

Action 

When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years. 

OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time. 

Use of the setting 

They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya. 

At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way. 

And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result. I said you probably won’t want to pin this list up on a wall anywhere, but honestly? If you do read back a clench-quake-contort passage in your own fiction, then you might want to (A) delete nearly all of that that clenching and quaking, then (B) check back here for alternative approaches. 

Your writing will get better, instantly, if you do that. And – you’ll have more fun. 

*** 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY 

Take any passage in which you’ve got excessive dependence on physical statements about your character and rework it, using any mixture of the tools here. You’re welcome to keep some physical statements in your scene, but make sure you keep a nice balance overall. We want to get a rich and rounded sense of the character’s emotion – written in a way that doesn’t make me want to scream. 

What I need: 

• 250 words from your scene 

• 2-3 lines of introduction as needed 

I’ll give feedback to a good handful of you. All are welcome to participate, but I’ll only offer feedback to Premium Members. When you’re ready, upload your material here. If you’re not yet a Premium Member but would like to be, then you can join us here.

*** 
That’s it from me. We have a new puppy in our lives. He’s called Dibble, and he’s a black-and-white poodle / papillon cross. He has four white socks, a white bib, a touch of white on his nose, and the end of his tail looks like it’s been dipped in white paint. The little lad is an absolute darling. My girls are smitten, but I’m not exactly unsmitten. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

Sometimes that means simply reporting what a character thinks of something.

The coffee shop was white, vaguely seaside-y in its timber and flaking paint, over-priced and, Niamh thought, pretentious.

 That ‘Niamh thought’ simply plops the character’s view right into the description without feeling a tad out of place.

But character can and should sneak in anywhere.

The bickering couple moved away from their seat in the window, and the rain had left, and there was sunlight on the wet street, shining off car windscreens and fallen magnolia petals.

And, yes, in a way that’s just description: a matter of stating simple facts. Except why is Niamh observing these facts? There are other observations she could have made. In the same place at the same time, she might have chosen to observe:

The door to the toilets wasn’t properly closed and the sound and smells of plumbing eased through. Coffee here was four pounds a cup, and the most prominent aroma was pine-scented disinfectant.

One of these snippets suggests one mood. The second delivers quite another. And we all know that if we’re depressed, we see the world differently from if we’re not. Our views of people and situations are coloured by our own mental state.

It’s the same in books. If I’m describing sunlight on a wet street, I’m offering you something (however hard to put into words) about the character’s mental state. If I’m passing on facts about the price of coffee and toilet smells, then I’m suggesting something quite different.

But character can invade even more directly than this. Take this:

The coffee arrived. Each cup came on its own copper-trimmed wooden tray, with a small glass bottle of milk and an oat-biscuit about the size of a large button. The waitress, inevitably, paused to tell them about the Colombian estate from which the coffee had come.

That whole chunk is factual narrative, but always filtered through the observation of a particular character. The ‘size of a large button’, for example, tells us about the character’s range of reference. ‘Button’ is quite homely, quite domestic in nature. A ‘good-sized poker chip’ would tell us something different. A ‘heavy-duty washer, the sort you’d use in roofing’ would give us something else.

But look a little deeper. The little snippets I’ve created for this email are all voiced in the third person. We have an unnamed, impersonal narrator whose job is mostly just to describe facts: what happened, what Niamh said and did, what she thought and felt, and so on. The narrator knows as much as we choose for them to know. For all I know, in the next chapter, the narrator will be talking, not about Niamh, but a burly Polish roofer called Lech. But no matter who the narrator is talking about, he or she is basically impersonal. A being of no interest.

Look back at that oat-biscuit snippet. It says, “The waitress, inevitably, paused…” That word, ‘’inevitably’, belongs to Niamh, not the narrator. It’s her sarcastic comment about the café’s pretentiousness: the narrator doesn’t really have a view.

In effect, you can write third person, but your character should still infuse the entire text, with every observation, with every choice of word.

Now all that sounds as wholesome and good as an artisanal oat-biscuit. So why make a big deal of it?

Well, the reason is that plenty of text just feels like … words.

Here for example:

Before Sarah has time to find an excuse, they’re standing inside the dark entrance hall. She shudders. It’s as cold as the grave.

The man [an estate agent] fumbles on the wall beside the door and clicks the light on. A single bulb spreads a sickly glow around the room. Sarah takes in the parquet floor and wooden panelling and the smell: mould and cat pee. She can see the man properly now. Close up, he looks older than she’d first thought. Fine lines score his face and she wonders if his luxuriant dark hair is quite natural.

‘Do you have a place to sell yourself?’ he asks, his voice casual. ‘I take it you’re on the move?’

She focuses on his face, concentrating on keeping her eyes steady and her mouth from contorting. She tells herself she must try to appear normal, even if she feels far from it.

‘Yes, probably, quite soon,’ she says, her voice unnaturally bright.

He smiles, a professional smile, still probing. ‘Is it in the area?’ He shakes his umbrella and slips it into an oak stand beside the door.

Her fists clench involuntarily. She’s not going to tell this man that her life has imploded. That only a few hours ago she walked out on her husband with just three suitcases and a couple of tea chests to show for fifteen years of marriage. How can she talk about it to this stranger before Alex himself knows – even though she owes him nothing? Panic washes over her …

Now, look, that chunk is lifted from a book called The Orphan House by Ann Bennett, and it’s got lots of lovely reader reviews, and I haven’t read it, so maybe the book has depths that I can’t assess from this passage. Sorry, Ms Bennett.

But:

I do not love this writing. I do not love prose that works like this.

In this short passage, Sarah shudders. She concentrates on keeping her eyes steady and has to work to prevent her mouth from contorting. Her voice is unnaturally bright. Her fists clench, though she doesn’t ask them to. Panic washes over her. That’s a truly vast amount of shuddering, panicking and clenching, while at the same time keeping the voice bright and the eyes steady. It’s such a barrage of information, it’s not quite clear we can meaningfully assemble it, except in a very basic “oh, she’s feeling emotional and upset” way. I don’t even think the author has any more precise conception of her own. If she had, she’d have given it to us.

The factual observations give us nothing either.

The house is as cold as the grave, which might mean that the character has her mind filled with death and the end of everything … but is much more likely to reflect the unconsidered use of a tired old cliché.

An old, unheated house smells of mould (normal) and cat pee (not so much, unless the place is so derelict that there are ways for cats to enter the property.)

The light is sickly. But what does that mean? Normally, that would suggest a greenish light, but why would a house have bulbs any different from anyone else’s bulbs? The observation isn’t followed by anything, which makes me think that the word ‘sickly’ is used simply in order to convey a very general “this property doesn’t look all that great” message.

In short, we have a passage that is NOT invaded by character. The author doesn’t use the tools she has to deliver character via back-door routes, and she compensates with a whole barrage of shuddering and panicking.

The result feels both flat (because of the deadness in the observation) and over-coloured (because of the babbling, quaking character on the page.) That’s a bad combination.

My advice? Don’t write like that.

My further advice: Stay close to character. Always and everywhere.

You’ll like it if you do.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Well, it’s clear what we need this week: 250 words from your text that is infused by character. We’re going to be looking especially for factual observation that conveys something about the character present. Extra bonuses if there are places where the character sneaks control from the narrator.

If you’re writing first person, then all of this is easier and more natural, but that also means the demands rise. Every word of your passage needs to belong to your character. We need to be smelling him or her in every line.

Please also give us the title of your book, and a line or two of introduction, so we can make sense of the scene.

When you’re ready, post your work here.

***

That’s it from me. I am going to clench, shudder and panic my way over to a coffee pot and see if caffeine will help. It surely will.

Til soon.

Harry

And, out of curiosity really, I just started watching (in 15 or 20 minute chunks) David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. I’m not sure how widely known that name is outside of Britain – but the guy was an Oxford scholar of the Middle East who ended up uniting the – normally squalling – Arab tribes in a revolt against their Ottoman overlords. This happened as part of World War I, and since the Turks were allied with the Germans, them bashing the Turks in the Levant was (a bit) helpful to the overall cause.

OK, that’s the historical background. The film history is that David Lean – already a well-known filmmaker – brought the film out in 1962 and was nominated for 10 Oscars in the 1963 awards, winning 7 of them.

The film runs for 3½ hours. It’s perfectly willing to have long, long takes that show little more than figures (and camels) moving through a landscape.

It involves a sexually ambiguous hero, who is (it is implied) raped mid-film.

The story doesn’t have a happy ending, as Lawrence’s dreams of Arab independence collapse as a result of individual greeds and colonial realities.

Could the film be made today? I doubt it. A niche historical drama of that length? With no superhero character, no bestselling source material, and not even a well-known lead, I think the film would stand no chance of securing the necessary funds.

Is it a masterpiece? Well, don’t ask me; ask the American Film Institute, who have the film ranked #7 in their list of the 100 best ever movies.

A masterpiece, that no one would make.

And don’t lay the blame on the passage of time. 1962 is not so long ago. We’re not dealing with the cultural distance of Shakespeare. We’re talking about the cultural distance of Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

And books?

The same, the same, the same, the same.

There are any number of great and successful books from the past which wouldn’t be bought today.

Sometimes, it’s just that something has been done to death. (Imagine trying to sell Twilight now. Publishers would groan at something so stuffed with genre cliché, and with so few twists on a theme.)

Other times, politics would come into play. Part of the problem with making Lawrence of Arabia today would be having a white man in a rescuer role. Publishers have become nervous and – some would say – oversensitive in their approach to navigating similar issues in the twenty-first century.

Then, perhaps, there’s just a sense that something has dated. So, for example, I don’t think my Fiona Griffiths books will date quickly – they’re not especially wedded to their period. But my first book, The Money Makers, felt dated within years of arrival, because of its setting in the 1999/2000 financial industry.

But looking at all the great books that could not be published today misses the point.

The publishing industry is not in some sort of collapsed state. Old tropes die and new ones are born. If Shakespeare had been reborn in Victorian times, he wouldn’t have written the works of Shakespeare – he’d have been a Dickens. If Dickens were writing his first book now, it wouldn’t be Bleak House or Oliver Twist. It would be – well, we don’t know, because the man was a genius and geniuses aren’t predictable.

And you?

What about you? Because this email isn’t about Dickens, or Shakespeare or David Lean. It’s about you.

And you, my friend, are going to use this glorious great stretch of 2025 – a whole big, loping, empty year – to write something wonderful. Or to complete the wonderful thing you’ve already started.

And you’re not going to complain about the broken state of publishing because (A) it isn’t broken and (B) there are more ways to find readers than there ever used to be. But also, and mostly, because (C) you are writing your book in the glorious year of 2025, and every sentence you write is embedded in the culture of today – with all your knowledge of what people are writing about, responding to, watching, getting annoyed by and so on.

Believe in that culture. Be part of it. And, for sure, you can yelp about the stuff that annoys you, or subvert current tropes for something you think is better. Take yesterday’s idea and twist it in a way that makes it shipshape for tomorrow.

But whatever you do, apply your bum to that seat.

And write.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

First up – apologies. At the end of last year, I asked you for your agent questions and then got too overwhelmed by the onset of Christmas to answer properly. I’ve remedied that now. If you had a question about agents and all that, then check out the forum again, and you’ll find an answer there from me.

As for this week, it’s a New Year, so let’s make that the theme. Please give me:

• The opening page (max 300 words) from your current project. As always, give us enough background that we know what kind of book we’re dealing with.
• If you’ve submitted an opening page recently, then just give us something new – a chapter beginning, for example. Again, just give enough of an intro, that we know what we’re dealing with.

When you’re ready, post your work here.

Do please be as generous as always with your comments for others. Don’t forget to give useful, specific feedback as well as positivity and encouragement. The latter is nice; the former improves books.

Til soon,

Harry.