This is good advice. At least, my instincts tell me it’s good advice. Writing and publishing are so very subjective that we need a life-saver of instinct to cling to, or else we’d flounder around in a sea of conflicting ideas. Well, more than we already do.

The thing is, I don’t really know if it’s completely true. Personally, sometimes my instincts are spot-on. And sometimes, they really really suck.

My instincts, for example, tell me that everything I write will be loads better with at least one penis joke in it. This is so self-evidently not true that I can’t help but regard my instincts with suspicion.

I’ve submitted at least three books that I actively hated when I pressed ‘send’…and every one of those three books has been called ‘your best yet’ by my editor at the time.* On the other hand, when I sent in my last book I absolutely loved every word of it…and my editor (quite rightly) gave me huge revisions.

Several times, I’ve come up with what I think is an absolutely brilliant idea for a story, only to have it shot down in flames by my agent. But then another idea is okay. Why? Why? For the love of God, why?!!?

My instincts do not tell me. They are too busy partying with the penis jokes.

On the other hand, I usually know instinctively when there’s something wrong with a scene or a plotline a conflict or a character, even if I can’t figure out why. It gets all tangled up and it doesn’t work.

Except, of course, when it does seem to work, and I totally love it, and only discover later on that it doesn’t.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says that truly effective instinctive people have trained themselves with knowledge and experience, so that their split-second decisions are often the most accurate. After eight years as a published author, I’d like to think that’s true; that my instincts are informed by what I’ve learned. But sometimes, I can’t help but think that while you should trust your instincts, you shouldn’t trust them too much. You should look around for knowledge and experience too. For good reasons to fall back on. Maybe this is why I’m an analytical writer as well as an impulsive one; I like to know why something feels right.

I’ve had a really good couple of writing weeks, and I really like what I’ve produced. I think it does exactly what I wanted it to do; I think it’s challenging me while playing to my strengths, and I am in love with the characters**. I feel that way, of course, until it comes time to let it out into the world. Then my instincts run off to party again.

What are your thoughts about your instincts?

*I like those books a lot better now, with distance. And no, I’m not going to say which ones they were.

**It doesn’t include any penis jokes, though. I wonder if maybe I should put some in?

It’s good to try these new things, I think, but I won’t lie to you: it’s been painful. It’s taken me two days, and many times in those two days I’ve felt as if I’ve been battering my head against a stone wall whilst crows of doubt lurked overhead, waiting to eat the choicest bits of my brains.

So many of the things that give a story richness and depth come to me as I write the actual words: the scene-setting, the intertwined symbols, the layers of emotion, the voices of my characters, not to mention the little funny details or extra dramatic oomph. And for me, that’s a big part of the joy of writing. This synopsis (and it’s still a first draft at the moment) feels like a skeleton without any flesh on it. I’ll have to attempt to add sinew, muscle, blood and skin as I revise the synopsis draft.

However. It’s been a really useful exercise for me in structure and planning ahead. Though it’s longer than a single page, I followed (more or less) the synopsis formula I’ve posted here, plotting events on a three-act graph and making sure that each event raises the stakes for the characters. For once in my life, I’ve figured out the secret twist before my own characters have (shock horror!).

The idea behind this is that it might help me to structure the book better at the scene and character arc level as I write it, and avoid my usual missteps, especially at the beginning when I tend to write and then delete 10,000 wrong words. I think it will be an interesting experiment, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

I do think that every now and then as writers, we have to be open to trying new processes. It can, maybe, push us in new directions, challenge our abilities and lead to something fresh.

Are any of you pantsers who have tried to write to a synopsis? Or plotters who have tried to just fly off into the mist? What was it like for you?

(Edited to add: @MsAlisonMay reminded me of a useful technique I’d mentioned on the course I taught a couple of weeks ago—highlighting different parts of your synopsis to see what you need more or less of. Here, backstory is green, plot is blue and emotion is yellow.

I can see that I’ve got emotion covered, but maybe I want to work on that plot aspect a little bit more. Thanks, Alison!)

I am here to tell you that all of that is rubbish.* Every novel, even novels that are not Great Works of Literature, has a theme. Some novels have lots of them. And they’re not difficult at all.

The theme is your novel’s predominant idea, or emotion. It’s what your novel is about—not at the plot or character level, but at the more abstract, intellectual or emotional level.

For example:

The Harry Potter series is about a boy wizard defeating an evil snake guy and playing a lot of Quidditch on the way. But the overarching theme of the series is love. Harry’s strength (and indeed his life) comes from the love of his parents, his friends, and his colleagues. All through the novel, love wins, and Voldemort is ultimately defeated because he can’t understand it. There are secondary themes about growing up, and finding out who you are, and probably several more. This is a single theme going across nine books, and it helps to make them emotionally satisfying. It’s not difficult, but it’s important.

So how can you find your novel’s theme?

Think about what your characters want. How they have to grow and change. Think about the sort of things they get up to, and how that shows who they really are. Jot down some single words that sum up some of the emotions they’re going through, some of the problems they face, some of the ideas they’re wrestling with.

They don’t have to be difficult words: some examples are trust, identity, loss, memory, loyalty. All of these are simple words, which portray very complex ideas.

Perhaps you’ll discover that your novel has several different themes. That’s fine. Lots of them do. But generally, your novel is going to have one theme that’s more important than any of the other ones.

Once you’ve discovered your theme, you can use it to refine your novel so that you make the theme even stronger. You can design scenes and plot events that revolve around this theme. You can use your secondary characters to embody different aspects of the theme. You can refine your language so that the theme is teased out through symbol, metaphor, setting, description, tone.

I like to define my theme very early on in my writing process. It gives me an idea to riff off of. I’ll write the theme down and keep it in mind the whole time I’m writing the novel. It keeps me focused. The theme of Getting Away With It, for example, is identity, which is why it’s about identical twins. The theme of The Summer of Living Dangerously is escape, which is why the heroine takes a job pretending to be someone else. The theme of my next book is motherhood.

Does it matter if your novel has the same theme as another novel? No way. Harry Potter‘s theme is love. So is Romeo and Juliet‘s. They’re entirely different texts, because there’s a lot to say about love.

Some themes are more suitable for certain kinds of novels than others. For example, romantic novels are often about trust, confidence, vulnerability, family, belonging, and less often about ambition, hatred, revenge, morality or existentialism.

If your theme seems to be working against your genre requirements, that could be a good thing (it’s refreshing) or a not-so-good thing (you’re not giving your readers a satisfying experience).

If you’re writing a romance, one of your themes is obviously going to be love. Try to take it a little deeper and discover another one, too; it can give your novel more scope and emotion. But remember: keep it focused, especially if you’re writing a short, commercial novel.

Your theme can give you some ideas for your title, too. Lots of novels have their themes in their title, either literally or through a metaphor: Pride and Prejudice. Crime and Punishment. The Thorn Birds. Gone With the Wind.

Knowing your theme can give you a very useful focus for writing your novel, and—when combined with a snappy plot-based pitch—for selling it. Plus, it’ll really impress your former English teacher.

Thanks to Jane O’Reilly, one of the participants on my Advanced Novel Writing course, for giving me the idea for this post. If you’d like to suggest a topic to discuss in future posts, please do!

*And I used to be an English teacher, so I KNOW.

These little things can make the difference between an agent, or an editor, or a contest judge, or even a writing instructor like me thinking ‘Hey, yeah, that looks good and professional’, or thinking ‘Hmm, this might be hard work.’

Here they are.

Check your work for spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. Computers do this fairly well, but not all that well, especially with things like homophones and punctuating speech. So you need to learn as best you can how to spell, punctuate and express yourself accurately, and check your own work carefully. If you know you have difficulty with this (and many excellent writers are dyslexic, for example), recruit someone to help you.

Format your work correctly. This means the following:

• Font should be black, 12-point, and easily readable (eg Times New Roman or Arial).
• Your story should be double-spaced. (Your covering letter and, usually, your synopsis can be single-spaced; check guidelines.)
• Indent your paragraphs. Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs within your story unless you have been asked to do so (this is okay in a single-spaced synopsis).
• Don’t fiddle with margins to make them smaller or bigger.
• Get rid of ‘widows and orphans’ in your formatting menu (it’s usually under Format: Paragraph).
• Left-align your work.
• Include a header or footer with your title and the page number, and also your name unless you have specifically been asked not to do so (for example in a contest with anonymous entries).

Send in what you’ve been asked to send. If they categorically only want a one-page synopsis, don’t send a two-pager. If they ask for only a covering letter with a short blurb, don’t also send a synopsis. If you’ve been asked to send the first page of your manuscript, don’t send page 38, or the entire thing. If they want 1000 words, don’t send 1500.
 
When I get a manuscript to read that doesn’t follow these simple bits of advice, I feel…cranky.
 
Is that how you want people to feel when they read your work?

But. Next week I’m doing something completely new for me: I’ve organised my own writing course, a one-day course in Advanced Novel Writing. I have eleven talented participants, all of whom signed up before the ink was dry on the tweet where I mentioned I was giving it. I’m very excited about it. I’ve led lots of courses before, obviously, but this is the very first one I’ve organised all on my own.

Planning the course has got me thinking about writing craft again, and it’s made me resolve to spend some more time on this blog talking about writing.

First, though, I’m going to talk about critiquing. I’ve been doing some critiques for various reasons, mostly of the first few pages of unpublished writers’ fiction, and this has brought up two issues in my mind. One, is that many, many unpublished writers make exactly the same mistakes. Here are the most common I have noticed:

• Starting the story in the wrong place. Overwhelmingly, the problem is it starts too early, though very occasionally it starts too late
• Overload of exposition or backstory, which slows down the pacing
• Problems with choosing the correct point of view(s) for the story
• Difficulty in presenting a sympathetic protagonist
• Lack of clarity about which genre or market this story fits into
• Lack of tension or conflict
• A sense that this has not been edited or polished, and is exactly as it came out in first draft form, with little sense of how a reader will experience it
• Too much telling, rather than showing

These are mistakes that I’ve made myself. In fact several of them are mistakes I make on a regular basis, especially in first drafts. I believe that in a lot of cases what separates writers who are ready to be published from writers who are not yet, is not that the published writers naturally write better, but that the published writers have learned how to EDIT AND REVISE better. We have a bigger tool box with more strategies in it.

Which is encouraging, I think. You can learn this stuff. Of course, you can forget it all again, as I do…but then you can relearn it.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that I’m frickin’ mean. I will not hesitate to tell you in the strongest terms that your manuscript has any or all of the issues above, not to mention several others that may be unique to you alone. I’ll tell you what I like about it, too, but then I will wham you over the head with a hammer, steal your candy, and run off laughing.

Well, not laughing. I don’t actually like being mean. I have strong opinions, but I constantly worry that I’ll crush someone’s dreams with a bit of misplaced well-meant criticism. I don’t mean to; like I said above, I’ve made, and still make, a lot of these mistakes myself. But there’s a danger that speaking as a published author or a teacher, I’m setting myself up (in others’ minds, anyway), as An Authority or An Expert, The Final Arbiter Of What Works.

And I’m not, by a long shot. I’m still learning. Despite what I might say on this blog, or in your critique.

Quick link promo: I’m interviewed this week over at Free Your Parenting, talking about potty training, tantrums and living in the now. Much like writing, really. And drop by The Heroine Addicts and party down with us to celebrate Christina Courtenay’s new novel, HIGHLAND STORMS.

In ten years I’ve seen members come and go. Several treasured members have died, including one who had belonged to Reading Writers for over 60 years. The group has been invariably welcoming, supportive and helpful. Reading Writers celebrate every success and I think that is the heart and soul of the group.

This spring we created a new anthology, ANOTHER LIGHT RAID. It’s got poetry, fiction and nonfiction, a wide variety of voices. It’s dedicated to the memory of our former secretary, Don Louth, and a majority of the profits from each sale goes to the Duchess of Kent House charity, who looked after Don in his last weeks.

I’ve got two short stories in it—one being the very first piece of fiction I ever had published, and another one which is quite a departure from my normal writing. And there’s fifteen other authors’ work to explore and enjoy.

It’s available as an ebook and in print. Please do check it out here.

This is a long-ish question from the lovely Lisa, so I’m going to break it down a bit. Unfortunately I have no answers, but I do have some thoughts that might spark something in Lisa’s brain, or maybe someone else has more ideas. Lisa’s writing a women’s commercial fiction novel, and her problem is that she’s afraid her heroine is boring.

The heroine is Grace. She’s an interior designer with a passion for her work and period properties. She’s a mousy, studious person, committed to her career without much of a social life. There’s no doubting she’s cautious but I need her to be like this because her issue is she’s afraid to fail. She needs to be in control and she can do that in her work but she can’t in relationships and so she’s had a few brief flings which have fallen by the way side in the past because what if she trusted one of those men and they had broken her heart and the relationship had failed?

Okay. So the problem here is that the heroine’s main inner conflict is that she’s cautious and afraid to fail, and this has made her a bit dull. Which is fine in real life…but in commercial fiction, we tend not to want dull heroines, because we’re reading this for entertainment, right? The challenge, then, is to discover a way to get the reader hooked into the heroine, while still keeping her inner conflict. (I’m assuming you know, Lisa, WHY Grace is so afraid of failure, and what she thinks the horrible consequences of failure will be, so that you can raise the stakes for her as high as possible.)

By the way, I like how Grace’s need for control is manifest in her job, where she makes order out of chaos and decay. How does she reconcile the risks you need to take to be a successful designer, with her fear of failure? This could be an added layer to her conflict, for now or later.

So within the first chapter I establish her as the studious, dedicated, passionate-about-her-career person that she is, climbing to the top of the career ladder where she’s aspired to be, in charge of the artistic design of a 18C Georgian Townhouse. Then I bring in the inciting event: her boss takes the project off of her and gives it to his wife to handle, leaving Grace tasked with her pet hate; bog standard interiors on a development of new houses.

I think I’ve got all the ingredients there to make the reader want to read on but the person in my critique group has a point; if the reader finds the character boring, they won’t read on. So my problem is how do I make it more interactive for the reader? I’ve written it in the third person so I guess having a go in the first person might make it more immediate?

I think there are a few potential problems going on here, so I’ll look at them separately, but you might find in the end that it’s a combination of things that might work.

Act One problems
In a traditional three-act storytelling structure, which is what most commercial fiction uses, Act One is the (usually brief) set-up section, where you establish things like setting, the main character, and their underlying issues. This is what you say you’re doing in your first chapter. But since Act One is about setting up, rather than getting the story moving, it can be a little boring. That’s why many narratives actually start with the inciting event, plunging us straight into conflict and filling in all the Act One stuff as they move forward.

It might be as simple as skipping ahead in your story and starting at the moment of the inciting event. Or, less drastically, by cutting your Act One down to a couple of paragraphs, half a page to a page max. It’s worth a try, anyway.

However, sometimes you do need an Act One, to orient your reader. I began the draft of THE SUMMER OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY with the inciting event, and my editor thought I was too quick off the bat. She wanted a little time to establish who the heroine was before she started living dangerously. Unfortunately, my heroine, like yours, was in a rut—and ruts are boring.

So how did I create an Act One without (I hope) being boring? I used humour and voice, for one. That can help pull a reader in. I also gave my heroine a quirk or two—not annoying ones, just little things that make her unique. I tried to make the rut itself actually a little bit interesting—you could do that yourself with your heroine’s job. Also, I made sure that I wove in some conflict from the first line, showing that my heroine is bored with her rut, and establishing within a page that her best friend was emigrating.

First person might help, too, as you suggest. Can’t hurt to try; maybe using first person would add things like humour, voice, conflict, and interest that I mention above.

Passive heroine
Your other problem could be that the inciting event here forces your heroine into a passive role. Her boss is taking the project off of her and she can’t do anything about it, at least not at first. Passive heroines aren’t as interesting as active heroines.

What can you do to make Grace active in her own problems? Maybe you can start with her making a mistake, which leads to her boss taking away the project? This would tie in with her own fear of failure, too, giving us a good strong sense of her inner conflict and raising the stakes.

You can probably think of other ways to make her active in this situation, too.

The other conflicting factor could be that I introduce the secondary heroine, Izzy, in this scene too. Izzy, is very young (19), vibrant and with a lot to learn. Still living at home, her motivation is to become independent. My idea is that as the story evolves both heroine and secondary heroine will learn from each other; Grace will learn from Izzy that it’s okay to make mistakes, to go wrong, so long as you can put it right – essentially Izzy will help Grace become less ‘mousy’. Perhaps I should leave her out and just concentrate on the inciting event to start with – get the reader hooked?

It’s always a danger with a ‘mousy’ heroine that she’ll be overshadowed by a more vibrant secondary, and it sounds like that might be happening here. You might be right to trust your instincts and save Izzy for a little bit later in the book, when your reader is already on Grace’s side, and when they can see her for what you mean her to be—the heroine’s foil and a way each of them can learn. Or, you might find that trying one or more of the suggestions above makes Grace interesting enough so that she can compete with Izzy for the reader’s attention.

In GETTING AWAY WITH IT, there was a very good reason why I didn’t introduce spiky, sarcastic, difficult heroine Liza at the same time as her sweet, considerate, sunny twin sister Lee. I wanted my reader on Liza’s side before we see her much nicer twin.

I’m wrestling with an issue very like yours, Lisa, with my current WIP. My heroine, Fern, is super-nice. She’ll do anything for anybody, and while that’s one of her strengths, it’s also one of her weaknesses. I need to start my story showing this trait and conflict—which means that I need to start with a) Fern being put upon (ie passive) and b) Fern helping one of her friends, whose situation is necessarily more dramatic and therefore interesting than Fern’s.

I’m trying various ways of solving this problem, most of which I’ve mentioned above, though I’m not 100% sure I’ve cracked it yet.

Anyway, does anyone else have any other ideas of how to solve the dilemma of the boring heroine?

How hard can it be?

Well, actually it can be pretty damn hard. Turns out I’m not all that much a whiz at titles. Let’s see…I’ve sold 14 books now, and I’ve kept my own titles with five of them.

When I was writing for Mills & Boon, that wasn’t surprising. Nobody, or hardly anybody, chooses their own titles for M&B novels. The titles have a style and keywords of their own and that style and those keywords are seemingly set in stone by the marketing people—at least until they change their mind. This is one reason why, as a reader, you shouldn’t be put off by these titles like The Billionaire Sheikh Cowboy’s Secret Baby Marriage of Convenience of Revenge, because underneath that horror of a title there is most likely a really good, exciting, touching story with hardly any sheikhs or revenge in it, and which was probably originally titled Ouch! Get Away From Me With That Thing!

Or similar.

Anyway, as I said, I’m not so good with titles really. The provisional title for one of my M&Bs was Remarkably Penetrative Sperm, and I persisted in calling another book Who’s Your Daddy? until my agent renamed it One Night Stand. The title that is widely agreed to be my best one to date, Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom, was mine but it was originally a joke, a working title that I would not have believed I would be allowed to keep in a million years.

Now that I’m writing for a mainstream imprint, the title selection process for the past two books has gone something like this.

1. I come up with a working title. The working title for my next paperback was, at first, THE WATERLOO SUMMER, which I liked and my agent also liked but we both agreed that it wasn’t much of a title for this type of book, especially when I changed the date of much of the imaginary action to 1814, when the battle of Waterloo hadn’t even happened yet. So I changed the working title to THE REBIRTH OF MISS ALICE WOODSTOCK, which was a line from the novel.

2. I submit the novel and my agent and my editor both tell me the title is bad. The novel then becomes called UNTITLED. (My novels spend a lot of time being called UNTITLED.)

3. All of us—me, agent, and editor and also assorted helpful people at my publishers—start brainstorming new titles. These titles need to fit the book, sound snappy and appealing to the target audience, and not have been used very recently by anyone else. It has to look good on a book cover, too. We come up with lists and lists. Lots of them are rubbish (you can guess who usually comes up with the rubbish ones) and some of them are actually quite good. When we get a good one, we share it with each other and if someone doesn’t like it, we scrap it and start again. It turns out, it’s actually quite difficult to please three people with the same title. This can be frustrating, but the thing is, that my agent and my editor really know their stuff, unlike me, so I trust them implicitly and know that eventually, it’ll happen. This process can take months.

4. At some magic moment, someone (ie a person who is not me) will come up with a title that makes all of us cry, “That’s it!”

5. This happy time immediately becomes a nail-biting time whilst you wait to find out if the shiny new title will be approved by the editorial team, and then by the sales and marketing team. If not, you’re back to the drawing board.

6. If everyone likes it, then you have a title! Hooray!!

Having been through this entire process, I can now very happily confirm that the title of my next novel will be THE SUMMER OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.

Nice, isn’t it?

This was, as you can imagine, fantastically fun to write; it was like writing a Regency romp but with a sort of knowingness to it, in that all of the characters are actually modern and are just pretending. It meant that I needed to know more about modern perceptions of Regency customs, than the actual Regency customs themselves (if that makes sense). I needed to mention the little things that actual Regency people would take for granted, but that 21st-century people pretending to be Regency people would notice. Such as knickers, or lack thereof. Or what it feels like to wear a corset when you’re used to a bra. Or how difficult it is to embroider.

Anyway, because of this, today I’ve been researching various bits of 1814 minutiae. For example, mourning periods and when one can go into half-mourning for a parent, or marry after the death of a sister. The permissible colour schemes for a hall, saloon and drawing room. The weather in the summer of 1814. Slang for “exhausted” or “beautiful”. Who would be introduced first in a room full of people of equal rank. And the precise amount of minutes one can stand still at the end of the set during “The Duke of Kent Waltz”.

One of the great parts of research like this, is that I actually know people who know the answers to these questions, or know where I can find them. People in the Romantic Novelists’ Association are hugely knowledgeable, and I’ve also met people through my research who can help me—historians, interpreters, re-enactors, dancers, costume experts. As a writer, it’s invaluable to have kind, helpful people in your corner. And I love being able to email people out of the blue and ask them about historical knickers.

Have you learned anything interesting lately?

When I was a teacher, my students always used to groan when I did that joke. But I didn’t care. Bad jokes are part of the metaphorical grease that makes the school days go more quickly and happily. And I knew that my persistence was justified when one 4th May I forgot to crack the joke, and one of my students chirped up, “Happy Star Wars Day Miss Cohen!”

See? I did teach them something after all.

I’m feeling quite happy and justified at the moment. I’m halfway through doing the copy edits for this book (which may even have a title, quite soon—keep your fingers crossed!) and I’ve discovered that I really, really like it. I’m laughing and crying, sometimes at the same time. I’m falling in love with both of the heroes. I’m cheering for my heroine. All whilst crossing out commas.

It’s difficult to read your own work like a reader, and this is the first time I’ve done it with this book. And it might sound quite immodest to say that I like my own novel. But it’s true, and I think it’s important. While I’m writing the damn thing, I have quite a few moments where I hate it, and swear at it, and feel like it will never be any good. It’s all worth it if, at the end, I can look at the big stack of paper, words and ideas I’ve created and think, “Yeah. I’m proud of that. It was a lot of hard work, but I created something that I like.”

You’ve got to stop and pat yourself on the back every now and then in this business. Not too often, but once in a while.