But.

It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is.

In a passionate and funny TED talk, advertising guru Rory Sutherland said: “Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself.”

In other words, the packaging of a product can fundamentally alter our understanding of, and relationship with, its content. This has been proven time and time again. Good packaging can even positively impact our experience of something that is, ultimately, disappointing. A crappy present in a lovely box complete with ribbon, bow and neat corners is still a crappy present. However, it might make you smile because you know the gift-giver has put love, time and effort into the act of giving.

An example or two

Take a shirt. Go on, pick one up. Compare a shirt from Tesco with one from Hugo Boss: similar material, design, quality; but only one of them conjures up an image of a handsome, buff, lightly stubbled man standing confidently next to a painfully beautiful woman, both looking like they could take on the world and win. Only one promises to give you something more than a shirt to put on your back.

The same is true of books. We can radically alter a reader’s relationship with a book simply by modifying its wrapping. By giving it a brand. Like all brands, all visual identities, these can be built from the ground up or borrowed: alluding to other brands by using similar identifiers. Remember when Bloomsbury released Harry Potter books with ‘adult’ covers, so that grown-ups might not feel so uncomfortable reading them on the Tube? Remember how the kids’ versions were bright and bubbly with cartoon characters and fancy fonts? Remember how the new ones were dark and used smaller imagery and smaller, simpler fonts, suggesting mystery, danger and thrills? Remember how incensed people got having already bought and read the kids’ versions, and discovering there was no additional material inside? No altered words or themes? No torture or illicit thrusting? No difference between the texts at all?

The point? There is a relationship between a book and its cover. A change in the cover effects a change in its content, even if this change is only perceived.

What makes a good cover?

There is no formula to a good cover, but there is a set of underlying principles that can help us out. When looking at covers we ask the same, subliminal question that we ask of a gift: “Does it look like love, time and effort has gone into creating this?” There are, of course, many questions within this question:

• Does it look like my kind of book (i.e. does it conform to a genre I subscribe to; classic-lit / sci-fi / chic-lit / Booker Prize / crime)?
• Does it conform to the basic principles of design (this is real back-of-the-brain type stuff; the rule of thirds, elegant proportions, good composition, a consistent colour palette)?
• Does it look well produced? (Nice cardstock, laminated, un-creased, embossed, perhaps, foiled, hologramed)
• How big is the title compared to the author (which is more important)?
• Is the book endorsed? Do you know/respect the person offering the endorsement?
• Does the design compliment the title (is it well considered, modern, attractive)?

These questions, and the answers that go with them, bounce around our heads so fast that we barely recognise their existence. The conclusion is often formed at near light-speed. It can change just as quick, too. We might dislike the cover but remember the author’s name; one we have read before and enjoyed, an interview we heard on the radio, an endorsement made by our favourite author or critic.

Never settle for ‘good’.

What does this mean to us writers? Quite simply: that a cover can be equally, if not more important than the book inside. An interesting aside: eBooks might be subtly changing this, some eReaders unable to reproduce the artwork, but the same principles apply. I’ll leave that for another post. If you’re going to spend months/years of your life writing a book then it’s worth taking a deep breath, doing some research, and really thinking about the cover. “Yes, this one will do,” should never, in fact, do.

Ommwriter helps me write [more, better, et al]. It does this by reducing the number of features available to me (most text processors insist on adding more features to solve problems, which does nothing but add more problems). More options = more distractions from writing. Ommwriter understands this. Its best (and only) features are:

No spell check. You would not believe how distracting those red and green wavy lines are, how they act as an anchor around your ankle as you try to write, how the knowledge that they may appear at any moment keeps you focused on the words you have written rather than thinking about those you are about to write. You can check your spelling and grammar after you’ve finished the scene or chapter. It takes seconds.

Full screen. You can’t quickly visit the Internet when an application takes over your screen. Or check your email. Or Message someone. The result: you focus on the job in hand.

No text, paragraph or document formatting. No bold. No italics. Four font options universal to the document. No paragraph spacing or indenting or tabs or headings or any other styling tools that you could mildly obsess over. You can increase or decrease the font size to make it easier to read. That’s all. The words become paramount. The way they appear on the page becomes irrelevant.

Music. Sweet, sweet music. Stick your headphones on. The music is abstract, ambient. In addition to the music there is a set of four (always four) sound effects linked to keystrokes. The click, click, click of the keys. The result is something that is stunningly immersive. There are so few barriers between your mind and the words appearing on the screen that your word count will spiral out of control.

The words will flow, I promise you.

Ommwriter is free, for a while, and doesn’t cost much after the while is over.

As storytellers, knowing when to give information, when to hold it back, and what should remain hidden is a vital skill. Good comedians make great storytellers because the ability to pace the release of information is fundamental when telling a joke. Sir Peter Ustinov is said to have been one of the world’s most sort after and admired after-dinner speakers. The key to his awe-inspiring tales was this ability to master the release of information: what to illustrate, what to leave up to the imagination, what to repeat in order to reinforce or mirror for comic effect, when to deliver to punch-line.

In previous posts I have cited the book ‘The Reader’ as a good example of information architecture at its best. Michael, the story’s protagonist, had an underage affair with an older lady. He kept it a secret. She, the object of his obsession, hid the fact that she cannot read. After their separation she became a guard at a Nazi death camp. She took the blame for a heinous act, an act she was not solely responsible for, being unable read or write; but took the blame regardless, unwilling to admit to her illiteracy.  During her trial Michael worked out that she was unable to read but could not tell the tribunal in fear of revealing his own secret: their illicit affair. The drama unfolds with the slow, deliberate release of information and, equally as important, the unveiling of secrets between characters. If either of the main characters were more honest and vocal, the story would not have worked and would not have been told.

In who-done-its and other related crime writing forms, vital information is often withheld until near the end of a story. It’s expected that details will be withheld by the author. In other story forms, hold-back detail can be considered deceitful. Readers can become annoyed, feeling they have been manipulated. This deceit, however, is sometimes based on prejudices. An example: we get a chapter or three into a book when we are told that the main character “pushes down hard on the tires of his wheelchair and exits the room.” What? He’s disabled? The side-swiped reader feels betrayed because the mental image of the character that they have slowly built over thirty to forty pages, a character they have begun to associate themselves with, has been shot to pieces in less than a sentence. But… why? Is the character defined their disability? Surely not. Has the author hidden something or just added a minor detail? Is the fact that the character is in a wheelchair significant to the story up to this point?

Let’s use another example: race. As writers we can suggest ethnicity without being as explicit as offering up skin tones. A person’s name, the country they were born in, the country they live in, colloquial terms of suggested accents in reported speech can inform readers about a character’s outwards appearance. As readers we are, I hope, advanced enough to acknowledge that the colour of someone’s skin does not define who they are as a person. Skin colour might only a small part of a character’s identity (unless, of course race relations, ethnicity or identity is a core theme of the book). Let’s say we have a main character with a multicultural name, in a multicultural city, with a strong character, opinions that she is prepared to stand up for and protect, and three quarters of the way through a four-hundred-page novel someone insults her with a racial slur. Would this unnerve a reader? Even if the reader is ‘perfectly at home with multiculturalism’ (for the want of a better phrase), would they start to question what other information is being held back by the author? Why introduce it now? Why introduce it at all? What else is likely to be revealed at this late stage? Most importantly, as with the examples above, does the redrawing of a well-formed mental picture destroy the association between the main character and the reader? Is the storytelling illusion broken? Or is it a device? What if we had a bunch of neo-Nazi skinheads who goes around terrorising minorities in the neighbourhood and it is revealed, near the end of the book, that the protagonist is black? Or outwardly gay? Or Jewish? How about all three? There is, of course, other reasons (some outside of an author’s control) why race is avoided, hidden, or disguised in literature, but that’s a whole different post.

The point is this: it is not just a question of profiling. Take the wheelchair example. When describing the physicalities of a scene a writer might have to go out of their way to describe a character, their movements, actions, and interactions without referring to the chair. And the outwardly gay neo-Nazi? How can the author reveal that they are outwardly gay, having carefully avoided any reference to the fact during the vast majority of the tale? Is this not, by definition, an act of deceit? This argument against basing stories around a delayed twist is best embodied in the critical responses to the films of M. Night Shyamalan, which were described as being poorly constructed and “gimmicky”, reviewers correctly predicting that audiences would soon tire of the format; diminishing box office returns proving the critics right on this occasion.

In conclusion, if you do choose to release important information at key stages of a story be sure to make the release seem timely (e.g. as a consequence of pressure, trust or investigation) or, if released quickly or forcefully for dramatic effect, that the detail is foreshadowed (hinted at or introduced in a different context at prior points in the story).

Why is a sales funnel important to writers? It doesn’t matter whether you are published by a ‘traditional’ publishing house or self-published: you need to know how readers select books. We are all readers but, somehow, we always forget how we act when we put on our writing hats. It’s probably something to do with self-delusion: that people will ‘just know’ that my book is different. That seeing, touching or hearing about the book will have a profound effect on their decision making. We forget that reading is a) a big ask involving a great deal of time and, yes, money b) right at the very end of the sales funnel (book buying) process.

Click on the image to see the funnel in all its glory.

The funnel is colour-coded. The separations demonstrate the different physicalities at work: ranging from outside the shop (real or virtual) to inside the book (ditto).

I have worked in the creative industries as a designer and copywriter for over a decade. Every day I witness the volatile love-triangle between ideas, their ‘owners’ and the idea’s implementation (turning an idea into something tangible: an end-product). Ideas are beautiful things: vibrant, energetic, inspiring. A good idea resonates. The feeling that you get when you’ve had a good idea is similar to falling in love – you find purpose and direction and become fuelled with an energy born of possibility. Implementation, on the other hand, is hard work. Shaping that idea; carefully cultivating it and examining it and forming it into something hard and real; that’s difficult. That absorbs all of the energy from within the idea and demands even more once it has used it all up. Like a parasite, the implementation of an idea will suck the life out of you. Converting fragile dreams into robust prose is not for the faint hearted.

The superstitious bunch know this. They can feel the energy of a new idea – they grab hold of it and warm themselves and become suspicious of other people who might want to bask in the idea’s glow.  Like a jealous lover they want to keep it to themselves. What if someone steals it? What if they do something with it and I don’t? And, worst of all, what if the reality of writing it down does not live up to the promise of the idea, of the dream?

Like all superstitions, fear lies pitted at its heart.

The superstitious writer will tell you that their idea needs nurturing before being released to the world. It needs to be explored and grown and tested. They hope that, my swaddling it and growing it inside a dark cave it will, one day, emerge like a well-trained warrior ready for battle. The trouble is that, in swaddling our babies and keeping them wrapped up in cotton wool, we can do them more harm than good.

My relationship with my ideas is similar to my relationship with my daughter. Like most new parents I quickly realised that my child, even at a very young age, had a mind of her own. Whether we like it or not, our precious babies have their own life-force and we can do little more than watch and encourage from the sidelines.  Ideas – even those we conceive and nurture and fashion and mould in our image and put our name to and infuse we a piece of our soul – they ultimately do not belong to us. They will venture forth and face their own battles. We cannot always be there standing next to them, throwing ourselves between them and danger.

I love sharing my ideas – no matter how young and naive they may be. I believe that asking people for their opinions on an idea is a good thing. For me, the value far outweighs the risks. Exposed to the outside world our ideas will grow and become stronger much quicker than if held tightly and kept in the dark.

Great writing inspires us. Really great writing motivates us to act. So here is my call to arms: during your next writing group tell each other your ideas. Talk and, most importantly, listen to other people’s feedback. Don’t be precious about your ideas. It’s far better to set an idea free than to keep it inside to fester and die. Who knows – the worry that someone else might take your idea might even motivate you to act fast and write the damned thing down before someone else does.

Two: Plot your novel before you start writing the damn thing

Then what happens? Then what happens? Then what happens. Use Freytag’s Pyramid, break the story down into A, B and C plots and be aware what each brings to the table and how their weight is distributed across the story.

Three: Stress test your pyramid

People think peer review is about ironing out the little mistakes, patting each other’s back or forcing an eleventh hour rewrite of a couple of chapters. It’s not. Peer review once a book is written or in progress can only be an exercise in back patting or describing the water that some poor sod drowning in. Peer review your plot pyramid. Get people to question it or, at the very least, review it yourself. Take your time. Question the hell out of it, bend it, poke it, and see where the weaknesses lie.

Four: Mythic journey test

Use Cambell/Vogler’s mythic structure headings (journey and character archetypes and see how well they fit to your structure. Are you missing key stages? Do you know the key roles of your characters? Is your A plot driven by the hero? Is the hero reactive? Are they a hero at all?

Five: Chart character development

Characters develop, they change, they are affected. If they don’t change then they are dull, two dimensional and lacking. Understand their progress, chart their progress and make sure their progress is adequately represented in your story.  You cannot show that your character has grown without showing where they started.

Six: Peaks, valleys and rollercoasters

Some writers suggest that you should alternate your chapters so that characters experience highs and lows in a rhythmic order. This creates an emotional rollercoaster.  Thinking along another axis, you should also mix action (peeks) with reflection (valleys). This allows your character to think and grow, not just run around bouncing off the walls.

Seven:  Foreshadow engineering

People hate surprises. They say they hate predictability (I know that would happen) but they don’t: they hate it when something comes out of nowhere. The best experience a consumer can experience in storytelling is a nice twist. That’s a mixture of “I know that would happen” with the unexpected. Really good ones lay the groundwork and allow the listener to be led down one path, be aware of another and let the two link up. For this to work, or come close to working, you must make sure everything major that is introduced has been foreshadowed in previous chapters. The murder weapon.  The secret identity. The alibi. The whatever.

Don’t puke

The standard reaction to this approach to creative writing is disgust. There is a general consensus that focusing on the craft; turning the experience of storytelling into a quasi-scientific, over-analysed field experiment kills the artistry. Smothers the life. I don’t buy this reaction at all. Yes, you can choose a starting point and discover what happens while writing. I do this a lot myself. But it is not an efficient way of writing. Just looking at the seven steps above you can see that lots can be missed or misplaced. And don’t think for a moment that building a rigid skeleton for the story reduces any kind of organic development or stifles writing. Even the most well organised road trip is altered with diversions and technical problems. This is not a ‘step’ program. You don’t do it once then move onto the next stage. The structure will shift and react to every word that is put on the page. You will learn things about your characters and your plot will thicken, stretch and vibrate as the writing progresses. Hopefully though, these seven test will make sure it never breaks.

My first impression was born of conflict. The introduction laid out the intention of the book and said that it was written because there were very few books about fiction available to reading enthusiasts. ‘What about the Art of Fiction?’ I thought.  Straight away I was on the defensive and kept reading, waiting for Wood to cover the same ground as David Lodge.  An American professor versus and English lecturer – this should be good. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the end of the book to find very few repetitions and that Wood had managed to write about fiction without covering the same subjects as Lodge’s work, which I considered as being comprehensive.  Like Lodge, Woods presented passages from great works of fictions and then examined each of them in detail, explaining what was good about the selection and why it was good.  This has a three stage affect: first it makes you feel dumb for not noticing , then enlightened, followed by a strange sense of bewilderment. How much have I missed by not being clued-up? Am I liable to miss moments of greatness again? Probably.

What did I learn from the book? The reason I finished the book was its ability to wow me on at least three occasions. Three is an impressively high number.  My first wow moment was near the beginning of the book when it introduced the notion of the ‘free indirect style’. I won’t explain what it is (get the book) but it was a penny drop moment for me.  One of the reasons I battled with On Writing by Stephen King was his frequents bursts of “Thou shalt not…” Predictably, King goes off on one about adjectives and abverbs, how he hates them and strips them out and any writer worth his salt will do the same.  I don’t disagree with King but his ideas gave me a toothache. King, like many writers, has a background in journalism. Journalists are taught to hate adjectives and adverbs because they are subjective. Subjectivity7 sits at the opposite end of objectivity on the journalism scale and an easy way of sounding detached is to take out all modifiers.  By doing this you also reduce the word count and pair it down to ‘just the facts’.  What I loved about Wood’s book is that he gave a few examples of “Thou shalt not…” but followed each one up with ‘but look at all these famous examples of people who did and succeeded.’ One such example is using adjectives to create the free indirect style.

Wood continues his examination of items that have been written off by almost all other literary critics by studying the metaphor.  I’ve read a great deal about the metaphor and the simile and have never been able to extract much more enlightenment on their use than: “Be careful, they can be great but they usually suck”.  Wood manages to quickly and easily decipher their power and how they can be properly used.  Quite simply, they should come from the character rather than the author. To provide a very simple example: if the character involved in the section is a fisherman then the metaphor should be born of his thinking, his experience.  If the author uses something plucked from their own experience and outside of the constraints of the character then it will stink.

Two other notes of praise. First, an introduction to a passage from The Old System by Isaac Braun, which includes the sentences:

“When he saw the ground tilt backwards, the machine rise from the runway, he said to himself in clear internal words. ‘Shema Yisrael,’ Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels turned toward the river.”

I read that passage and my heart stopped beating for a few moments. The second near glorious experience offered by Wood is his inclusion of a passage from Smiley’s People by John le Carré:

“In the Station Square, after repeated rejections, he found an old, thin terminus hotel with a lift licensed for three persons at a time.”

Wood’s explanation of the extract (only one sentence of which is reproduced above) is magnificent – how realism can be achieved by using scant facts and the efficient use of description to build a painting made from the minimal use of precise brush strokes.  Heard about ‘show not tell’? Well here we learn that telling is one of the most important parts of storytelling.  It’s okay to tell, it’s okay to use adverbs and adjectives – as long as you know what you’re doing with them and why.

I highly recommend How Fiction Works, mainly as a refreshing refreshing antidote to all of those self help books and blogs posts listing ten things for successful writing blah blah blah.  Read something from someone who knows what they’re talking about – James Wood.

It is at this point that we can neatly divide writing into three ‘levels’ based on intention and outcome.  The first describes writing with a sole purpose: to inform. Writing that exists only to inform (a shopping list, a dictionary, a warning sign) fulfils a specific need.  It positions itself so that it can be accessed when a specific request for it is made.

The second level is ‘entertainment’.  Our horror writer may be devastated when laughter replaces shock but they piece has succeeded in entertaining – even if it is born of a slightly different emotional reaction.  Entertainment lies at the heart of all writing. It is the juice that makes everything else possible. Want to write history? Make it entertaining. Entertaining does not mean false, it does not mean superficial.  To entertain means to hold the attention, to divert, to ‘admit to the mind’.  Its antonyms are to bore or to reject.  It could be said that the best way to measure writing is by its capacity to entertain.  There is, of course, a cross-over between this level and the first. Some people read the dictionary for entertainment.  I once wrote a shopping list that read: “Orange juice, washing up liquid, VW Golf.” When my flatmate picked it up, he found it highly entertaining and stuck it to the fridge, showing every visitor who came into our house. What could I say? It was on my shopping list that day.

There is a third level, beyond entertainment.  I call it ‘insight’. Not insight into something external such as the world of a serial killer, the decision making processes of generals during the World Wars, the feelings and experiences of a street kid in New Delhi. I’m talking about insight into something internal: yourself. When writing provides you with the tools to evaluate your own actions, your own emotions, then it surpasses information, it goes way beyond entertainment.  This level of achievement could be the result of a character being such an accurate reflection of an audience that the relationship between the writer and the reader is fused.  It could be that the location or situation being described is so vivid that boundaries dissolve and the audience exists inside the construct, unaware of the transition.  Sounds ludicrous? To anyone who has ever jumped a t a horror film or cried during a tragedy, we have to admit that the transition, no matter how short and how shallow, is possible.   Just as good information can be entertaining, good entertaining can be an insight. It is not divorced from the first two levels – it still informs and it still entertains – but the result goes beyond both.  Writing is a form of communication. Communication is a two way thing – a conversation between reader and writer.  Great writing is when the writer dissolves and the reader is having a conversation with himself.