Hello Team CCC! Happy Monday! I’m in a very good mood because my podcast, You’re Booked, is back after a big break. We begin with the fabulous Fearne Cotton - I loved our conversation about literary road trips, being Taylor Jenkins Reid fangirls, mental health, big feelings and how books bring us joy. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts including Apple, Acast and Spotify. And we have even more iconic guests coming up! I might see some of you in Norwich when I interview Fearne on Tuesday.
Also, I’m in Colchester at the Red Lion Books Summer Soiree on Thursday 4 July (come and hang out after voting!) Tickets here
I’m coming to Waterstones Canterbury on Wednesday 10th July Tickets here
I’ll be at Waterstones Gower Street, London on Friday 12th July Tickets here
I’ll be at the House Of Books And Friends in Manchester on Monday 15th July - I’m waiting for a ticket link but you can request tickets here
I’ll be at Waterstones Nottingham on Wednesday 17th July Tickets here
I’ll be at the Fort Road Hotel, hosted by the Margate Bookshop on Thursday 18th July - email info@themargatebookshop.com for tickets.
More dates and links coming. I’d absolutely love to meet you, and talk about reading and writing. Also, my readers are incredibly friendly and welcoming, so if you’d like to come but you’re nervous about coming on your own, let me know and I’ll try to do a bit of matchmaking, and I’ll make sure you have a nice time! Also also - I’m buying so many lilac outfits from Vinted, so come along and see if I’m wearing your Eras tour cast offs! Really hope to see you this summer!
Anyway! Let’s get to this week’s newsletter…
How a ‘bad’ book taught me how to write
I’ve just finished a book that has made me furious. I didn’t enjoy it at all, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m filled with a ‘how did this get made?’ feeling. Every so often I watch something or read something that makes me feel exactly like Will Ferrell in Zoolander screaming ‘I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!’ Am I so very out of step with what everyone else enjoys? Is my taste bad? Am I weird?
This poor book, which I won’t name, came to me early. I get asked to read and provide blurbs for about 15-20 books a week, and I need to say no thank you to most of them. When I say yes, it’s because I’m already confident that I’m going to feel positively about the book. It’s very rare that I review books formally. Publicly, I choose to exclusively speak about the books I’ve loved. A) There’s literally a zillion* books out there to choose from; life is too short to do anything else. B) I’m an author, I’ve had bad reviews in broadsheets and bad reviews from Instagram users. Both break my heart, destroy my equilibrium and leave me unable to write for at least a day. I choose to avoid reviews as much as possible for this reason. The more I write and the older I get, the less recovery time I need. But I don’t believe my opinions are more important than anyone else’s feelings. And I’m in at least ten lively author Whatsapp groups – I have plenty of private outlets for my thoughts.
But this ‘bad’ book was inspiring. I itched to edit it. It’s not my place to do so, but I’d love to speak to the author and make some suggestions. And it reaffirmed my faith in my ‘weird’ taste. It made me realise how much I’ve discovered from trying to read as widely as possible, and how much I’ve learned about storytelling, as an author, tutor and mentor. I’m going to keep taking my crazy pills – and bring these lessons to my work.
Your characters don’t need to be ‘nice’. But I believe they need to be ‘likeable’.
I think about this all the time. My issue with this book is that I found the leads to be insipid. There was a tragic back story which was alluded to often. I knew the main character was ‘good’ because other characters kept telling me how hard she was working, what a decent friend she was, how she tended to be hard on herself for not doing ‘enough’. Here’s what I wanted and didn’t see – evidence that she was textured, human, fun to be around. I craved sparky dialogue that didn’t necessarily signpost major plot developments. Just a smart lacing of personality, a bit of wit and heat that made me yearn for a little more, a sense of who she was when she was with her friends and colleagues. (Marian Keyes, for example, is excellent at this. I love the way she creates a sense of life happening beyond the page – even the minor characters are people you’d want to go for a long lunch with.) I loved the smash hit Yellowface because while June is objectively dreadful, I wanted to spend time with her. I wouldn’t trust her with anything, but I found her completely compelling. She never bored me. I wanted to see what she’d do next. As I reader, I loved hanging out with her.
When you’re writing your characters, try to have a sense of what they’re doing beyond the page, and bring a tiny bit of that to the page. It’s what will make the book shine. I hated this book because I felt as though I’d got stuck talking to the main character at a party and didn’t know how to extricate myself from the conversation because she was so earnest. Make sure your main character isn’t someone you’d hide in the toilets to avoid in real life. I mean, it’s fine if they’re a serial killer, but not if they might bore you to death.
Show, don’t tell
This is the advice I heard the most when I started writing, and I’m still figuring out what it means. It’s about exposition – and let’s be real, it’s very hard to write a book with no exposition. Simply put, this is ‘explaining what’s going on’ – where are we? What time is it? Why is that dog wearing a hat? A very irritating and useful piece of editorial feedback I had when I was writing Insatiable was about exposition. I’d written a line from the point of view of Violet, my main character, who was thinking about how smart and sparkling her companions were, conversation-wise. I could hear my editor rolling her eyes, as she wrote something along the lines of ‘You can’t just tell us that they were shit-hot at chat. We need to actually see and hear the conversation.’ And I sighed, because she was right, and I wrote the line because writing dazzling dialogue is hard, and I was feeling lazy, and scared. I thought of something better, and it brought the scene to life and made for a stronger book.
Dialogue is a great way to show when you want to tell. I think the book I just read would be improved significantly with more dialogue, and better dialogue. Conversation ups the pace, and makes the story memorable. Without enough of it, I feel as though I’m being ordered to remember a list of events that I’m not especially interested in. (In a pinch, if you’re really, really stuck, you can always smuggle in some exposition within speech. ‘Ah, yes, Colonel Fairweather, how forgetful you are! Don’t you remember, Higgins was extradited to Switzerland for smuggling dogs’ hats in 1975?’)
Your trail of breadcrumbs is making a mess
This is me at my most Mugatu, but I hate, hate, hate a lot of hinting. Admittedly, when it’s done well, it’s wonderful. I recently read and loved Katherine Fleet’s The Liars (coming in August) and the trail works because it’s subtle and complex. We’re learning more about the mystery with every line, a picture is emerging, and the main character is charismatic and engaging. We like her, we trust her, and she’s believably vulnerable. We don’t feel that she’s trying to trick us, as readers, and we understand that her secret doesn’t just belong to her.
But, ooof! The number of bloody books I read where every chapter ends with something along the lines of ‘ALL WAS GOING WELL UNTIL I REMEMBERED ABOUT THE BAD THING. WHAT IS WAS, I CAN’T TELL YOU. I WON’T TELL YOU. READ ON, SUCKER. HIDDLEDEE HEE! RIDDLE ME THIS!’ Your job, as an author, is to get us on the same side as your principal character, your main storyteller. You can do that in infinite ways, but there’s no greater turn off than deliberate withholding. Especially if the withholding feels clunky, tacked on and it doesn’t play well with the rest of the plot. Of course you’re not going to reveal everything from the get go. But you need to give your readers enough to believe in the narrator and trust them.
This book infuriated me because when I got to the big reveal, I was told about the ‘bad’ thing the romantic lead had done, and then given a page long explanation about their past, justifying it – in a way that made me realise I knew almost nothing about the romantic lead despite being 4/5 of the way through the book. If I was the editor, I’d have said ‘take this backstory, and weave through plenty of flashback chapters, which will also make us understand why these two people fell for each other in the first place! Also, this backstory makes the main character a lot less insipid. If I’d have known this about her in the first place, I’d have been much more invested. Now, it’s much harder to believe she would have ever done what she did, because she’s so blah!’
Sometimes it makes sense to add more hints and clues in an edit. I believe that you should always have your reader at the forefront of your mind and keep them onside. Make them feel delighted to have spotted clues, hints and patterns. It’s OK for your main character to hold out on the reader, as long as you give them complex, vulnerable, human reasons for doing so. I never want to get to the end of the book and feel as though someone, somewhere is thinking ‘Ha! Tricked you! Didn’t see that coming, did you? Idiot!’
You have to be funny, sometimes
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff is a novel that has been praised for its beauty, profundity, and unflinching exploration of what it’s like to run from the nebulous threat of violence. It’s not a comic novel, but it’s definitely funny in places. There’s a moment when the protagonist stops to wash her clothes in the woods – and then realises that having a clean cloak makes her even more aware of how terrible her own body smells. This doesn’t move the plot forward, but it made me laugh, and stayed with me. It’s funny and unexpected to have this person thinking only of her survival, and running for her life, only to take a minute to think ‘Phew, I really stink.’
I believe that laughter is what makes life worth living. What makes us laugh is subjective (see above) but no matter what you’re writing, an occasional injection of levity will make it memorable, and light it up. This is why Yellowface sings, and why the dreadful June is oddly endearing. And this is why the book I just read felt so relentless. No-one was looking for the absurd. No-one was cracking any jokes. And I didn’t believe that any of the characters could be funny, if they wanted to. There was no evidence that anyone had a sense of humour.
You don’t need to build a world where your main character is delivering a tight five on rail replacement buses at the end of every chapter. You do need to create a universe where jokes exist, and your reader believes that your characters might tell them sometimes, even if it’s off the page. Think about what their favourite jokes might be. Think about the last time they were embarrassed. Think about the incongruities that catch their eye. Do they like stupid puns, or weird signs, or Bob Mortimer on Would I Lie To You? If you believe your characters like to laugh, we’ll believe it too.
*If you spotted the deliberate mistakes in this sentence, well done! You have excellent editorial skills
Well, well done, this post made me laugh!
I also find myself at times reading books and thinking how did this get made!! And then I get inspired because I think, surely I could be a published author one day if this book got published, then I am humbled as I remember that a least that person finished their novel, as I am yet to do…
But, I will say, one thing that does annoy me is when the suspense is just too suspenseful. When I find my self racing to get to the end just to know what happened but not really enjoy the ride I finish the book with a sense of disappointment. The books I adore the most are the ones I try and read slowly, even though I want to know what happens I would rather stay longer with the characters, savouring them.
My absolute pet hate at the moment is when the plot suddenly turns on a sixpence in the last two pages and you realise that they're planning a sequel. Great, but it's a novel, not a TV series. It has to end well too!!!