CERTIFYING THE DEATH OF YOUR BOOK

Recently I noticed that my blog has 222 followers (now increased, which slightly spoils the point but please don't go away). I noticed because it's a cute number but then it got me thinking. "Not for 222" is (apparently) the medical code for a hospital patient so close to death that he should not be resuscitated in the event of heart failure.

It got me wondering how a writer decides his beloved book is "not for 222". How many times can you allow it to be rejected? At what point do you decide there's no possibility of life? Is your unpublished book terminally unpublishable?

Strikes me there are two situations where you might have to make the dreaded 222 order on your book.

1. Your Work in Progress (WIP) is not progressing. It's stuck. What started with an appealing idea and hook has ground to a halt. You have begun to force the plot-line; you know that it all now hangs on an episode which doesn't completely ring true, even to you, but you're determined to make it fit and you pile in more and more things to force the reader to believe in your story. You're starting to bite your nails in your sleep. There are bits of your book that you love and you keep reading them aloud to yourself, marvelling at the gorgeousness of your talent, but you know in a secret and painful part of your heart that your book has been built on sand.
   
2. Your finished book has failed (and failed and failed and failed) to find an agent or publisher. Some have given glimmers of hope, which you have clutched at and possibly exaggerated in your mind; your friends and family love your book (duh) but no agent or publisher seems to care about that; your writing group keep telling you to carry on trying - they mop up your tears and tell you you are brilliant and that publishers don't know what they're talking about or are "only in it for the money". (Well, yes, actually, if you mean that they can't afford to make a loss on every book they take on and they do have to eat like the rest of us.)

In each of these cases, a brave decision must be made.

Situation One is an occupational hazard of writing. It's an often fatal illness that happens much more often to books written by inexperienced writers. As you become more experienced, you'll spot the symptoms earlier and treat the cause before it becomes terminal. I have just done this with an idea that I was utterly gripped by until I began to look ahead and think the plot through. I foresaw fundamental problems in motivation and development, so I killed my baby before I'd developed a relationship with it.

(Note: we talk about the importance of "killing our babies" in writing and it strikes me that killing babies is a lot easier than killing adults. Metaphorically, I hasten to add. If you let your book grow and invest huge amounts of time in it, it's much harder to let it go. Whereas, spectacularly unlike real babies, an idea being stillborn is just a pinprick, something you have to get used to. Apologies for the unpleasant analogy.)

Situation Two
"How many rejections should I accept before giving up?" I was recently asked after a talk on how to get published. It's not the first time I've been asked it. Obviously, there is no answer, or not in terms of a number. In theory, you could send it to every agent and publisher who takes that sort of book, which might only be 20 or it might be 100.

But there are two more useful questions you should ask:

1. How many rejections should I accept before doing some radical re-writing of my work?

Answer: not very many, frankly. IF you have submitted your book to the right people (ie you have researched carefully and only sent it to agents and publishers who handle this sort of work) and IF you have followed all the guidelines so far given in this blog and the submission guidelines of the agents and publishers you've approached, and IF your writing is good enough and IF your book is sellable, then it is likely either to have been accepted or to have attracted some specific feedback, even if not an acceptance yet. So, IF the feedback has alerted you to a problem, you should be re-writing now. IF the feedback has either been inconsistent or has suggested nothing, you should consider getting (perhaps paying for) a professional critique of your work. But be careful to research very carefully the "professionalism" of this critiquing ... (Future post topic.)

What do I mean by "not very many"? Well, you ask me for a figure and figures don't really figure in this game. But let's say, for the sake of argument, not more than ten. No, eight. Seven?

"Only seven? Or even ten?" I hear some of you say. Ah, I don't mean you'll only send it to 7-10 agents/publishers; I mean you'll only send it to that many before taking a long hard look at what you've written (another long hard look because of course you've already given it dozens of long hard looks - I mean a long, hard, critical and objective look). Somehow, you must get a good opinion as to what's wrong with your book which means that you haven't yet hooked anyone.

Thing is, if you send it to 25 and they all say "no way" and then you decide you could have written it better, that's 25 publishers you can't really send it to again when you've improved it ... Well, you can, but it's tricky and needs some careful handling.

But I said there were two more useful questions and the second one is even more useful:

2. What should I be doing while my book is out there being read by an agent / publisher / anyone?

And the answer to this is dead easy: you're a writer, aren't you? So you should be writing. You should be throwing yourself into your next idea. If you're not, you're no writer, just a one-book wannabe. And no agent or publisher wants a one-book wannabe. No reader wants a one-book wannabe.

So get writing. Be fickle - turn your back on your beautiful slaved-over book and fall into bed with a new lover.

When you do that, you learn several important things:

• that your first book may not be as good as you thought it was
• that you can fall in love again
• that the death of a book is not the end of you as a writer
• that being a writer is about striving to be better all the time and that this happens with practice
• that if your first book is not good enough you actually don't want it to be published
• that actually you can postpone the 222 decision and wait for new technology to come along (in the form of your new knowledge gleaned from writing the second book) which might cure the disease
  
• that if at some point you decide to slap a "not for 222" on your first book, this will be a positive moment in your career as a real writer. And that you will (I promise) get over your apparently tragic loss.

Don't get me wrong: it's tough, it hurts, and even grown men cry. But if you have another WIP, it's not so bad. And you will not regret it. Ever. I don't know a published writer who hasn't got unpublished work in a drawer. And I don't know a published writer who really wishes that that unpublished work was published. God, I'm glad mine wasn't.

And a happy corollary that comes from all this is that resurrection and reincarnation both exist in a writer's world: it can sometimes happen that an idea or a book that died can rise again, later, when you are grown as a writer, and become something so much better and stronger and more beautiful than it first was.

We have to love our books with a passion but sometimes we have to let them die; or leave them lying in bed while we look ahead to the next one to love. Call yourself fickle, call yourself callous - it doesn't matter as long as you are writing.

If you have more than one book in you, let's see it. If you don't, give yourself a 222.

MAKING BEAUTY PUBLISHABLE

This post by thoughtful and clever author, Emma Darwin, contains lots of apt stuff for all of us, whether published or trying to be. It also connects with this recent post of mine on pigeon-holes.

I like the way it rather successfully answers that thorny question, "So, you mean I have to sell my soul, sell my art, in order to be published? I have to sell out???" No, you don't. You can if you want to but you don't have to. What you do have to do is not be so self-indulgent, so self-obsessed, that you earn no readers with your unattractive selfishness.

It's a bit like Pointy Thought 1 - that the world doesn't owe you a contract.

I was going to treat you with a photo of the Edinburgh Book Festival DDay minus 1, but I walked all the way up there in the rain and then forgot to take a picture of it. Instead, you can have a picture of my sitting-room four days before the AGM and party which are pretty much all I'm thinking about at the moment (with apologies to all the people who are coming to my events which I should be thinking about - fear not, I'll be perfectly prepared when the time comes.)



And yes, those are Starbucks bags that you see before you. In them are not only 200 bags of coffee but 200 bars of chocolate, I'll have you know. Chocolate that I may not eat. It's killing me.

Oh, I have just remembered that although I forgot to take a pictire of the outside of the book festival and the sign saying One Day To Go, I did take a picture inside the foyer. Doesn't it look calm? You'd never know that this time tomorrow it will be buzzing.

EDIT, EDIT, EDIT. THEN EDIT AGAIN.

I just came across this very interesting piece by Jenny Diski in the Guardian.

In short, she was asked to guest edit a student literary magazine, and then the student editors disagreed with her editorial judgement. They didn't like the fact that she didn't effuse when she didn't think the pieces deserved to be effused over. They appear to have found her attitude of honesty to be at odds with their aim to make the magazine "an encouraging platform for new and developing student writers".

Those of us who want to be good writers, as good as we can possibly be, must be strong enough to allow (in fact welcome) professionals to judge our work. If we don't open ourselves to the notion that our work is not perfect, or is not even as good*** as it could be, then we don't deserve to improve. Or be published. Taking criticism is not easy, and I'm not saying we should always agree with it,. but we have to be open to it.

(*** corrected thanks to BuffyS's superior editing skills - but I'm not paying you BuffyS!!)

In primary school you might expect to be told you're doing brilliantly when you're not (though I question whether that's a good idea either ...) but by the time we're adults we have to face up to our short-comings.

Critique groups and writing groups are also often guilty of over-effusing and under-criticising; partly because when someone delivers negative crits, all hell breaks lose and the fall-out from deflated egos can be ugly to watch. So, if you can't take criticism in public, don't be published, because you'll sure as hell get it once you are. Instead, either find a trusted person and listen to that person's opinions or learn to edit your own work to within an inch of perfection. That inch is as close as any of us can expect to get, but we have to try.

If you remember only one bit of Diski's excellent piece, remember this:

"What surprised me most was how many of the stories felt unfinished, as if I were reading a early draft. Problems with structure, sentences that need to be worked on, far too many easy clichés not rejected - all of this normal for a first draft, even a second. For me writing is the editing. It's where the you make the story your own. Draft, redraft, let the thing sit, and then consider it again, read closely, carefully, cut away everything that you haven't properly thought through, and some things that you have."

It just about sums it up. Accept nothing less from yourself than intended perfection, even if perfection is rarely actually achievable.

SHOW NOT TELL - Part 2

If you have read and properly digested yesterday's lesson on SHOWING, NOT TELLING, you may now move on to Lynn Price's typically excellent and trenchant post on VISUAL WRITING. She makes many wise points, but the examples of dialogue particularly link with my show-not-tell post. Lynn makes the same points about adverbs and dialogue tags - and, though we're far from the first to do so, she got there before me, damn the pesky coyote. In fact, it was reading her words that spurred me to bring show-not-tell to your attention earlier than I was going to. Such an influence she is.

By the way, all this stuff about rules: rules are for breaking, aren't they? Rules are for beginners, no? No, actually. Writing rules are for writers who crave the power of language.

The only rule I go by is: if you understand the power of language, you will want every single word to be right. And you will never stop wanting to learn new ways to control your power and therefore control your readers.

Power-crazy? You bet!

SHOW NOT TELL - LET ME TELL YOU HOW

"Show not tell" we're always being told. "Told", not shown, you notice. Well, tough - I'm going to tell you how to show not tell.

1. Go easy on the adverbs. Adverbs, used lazily, are an immature writer's stock in trade. Yes, they roll off the tongue, but so does dribble.

Compare:

"Listen," she whispered conspiratorially.

"What?" he interrupted eagerly.

"Nothing," she replied, hesitantly, deciding that she was not going to tell him after all.

with:

She leant towards him, her hair brushing his cheek. "Listen. I ..."

His pulse quickened. "What?"

Carmelle took a breath. She paused. What if her informant was wrong? She shook her head, looked down at the stem of the glass pressed between her fingers. "Nothing."

Well?

2. Don't just tell us what someone is like: show him doing something. If you tell me what Fred is like, I may not trust you. See, you might have judged Fred differently from me. If you tell me he is cruel and callous, I'm struggling to understand what your definition of cruel and callous might be. But if you show me him ripping the legs off spiders and making a collage with them for his sister's birthday card, then I'm getting the picture. Thing is, you may be the author but I am so not interested in what you think and I don't want you to mediate more than necessary - I'll make my own judgements, thanks v much.

3. Go easy on the dialogue tags. They feel clunky and repetitive when over-used. And, as with adverbitis, it's so easy to tell the reader how the speaker spoke, but harder for the writer and often more satisfying for the reader when the attitude is revealed in action. Here's an example of horrible over-use of dialogue tags:

"Do you want to come in for coffee?" she suggested.

"Is coffee all you mean?" he wondered.

"What else would I mean?" she scoffed.

"Well, just that I thought you might have some biscuits as well," he responded.

"Aye, right!" she laughed.

Think about it: do we really need any of the words outside the speech marks? We can manage perfectly well with just the speech. Or, if you don't want the dialogue to speak, literally, for itself, how about this:

Carmelle looked straight at him. "Coffee?"

"Just coffee?" He stared back, streetlight shadowing his jaw.

"As opposed to?"

"Well, biscuits. I was thinking you probably do a mean chocolate digestive." How did he manage to make the word digestive sound so desirable?

"Aye, right!"

Do I make my point? Would you like a short writing exercise? I thought you would. Imagine you are me (buy some better shoes, eat more chocolate and learn to appreciate sparkly wine and you'll be more than half way there) and imagine you are writing this blog post. But imagine that you respect the rules of copyright and therefore can't use my words. So, come up with your own examples of dialogue to illustrate my points in 1 and 3 above.

Then, ask yourself how much longer it took you to write the example of good practice than the example of crappy writing. See, not easy being a good writer, is it?

Oh, I should probably say something very important about covering letters too: in your covering letter, don't tell us how brilliant you or your book are/is. Please, please, please. If you tell me it's wonderful or that it's told in a fabulously original voice, I will immediately not believe you. Let me be the judge of your quality. You're just the writer; you're not your own reviewer. So show me how good you are and then I'll tell you how good you really are.

DO REALISE, THOUGH ...
Often, telling not showing is perfectly acceptable. No, forget that: it's never acceptable. When it's necessary and right, it's necessary and right, and therefore perfect; when it's neither necessary or right, it's crappy. All you need do is think precisely about every word and phrase you write and analyse why you are deciding to put it there, and then your writing will be just wonderful.

"All you need to do" - so easy! Trust me, though: thinking about every word is the only way to learn to be a great writer. If you don't think about every word, your readers certainly will and then they'll tell you all about it; and the thing about readers is that they both show and tell. Ruthlessly.

NARRATIVE TRANSPORTATION

Why do we write fiction? Why should we? What does it do to the reader? Why? Why is it damned important? What will happen to the human race if we don't do it and if readers don't read it?

These questions and more are the ones I will attempt to answer in a speech next week. You can't come, sorry; but it hardly matters because in the course of my research I came across a wonderful blog, written by scientists/psychologists with an academic and passionate interest in the power of fiction. And their research articles are available on it. Free. Which is incredibly generous.

It's called Onfiction and I've put a link in my blog list, as well as here.

It is fascinating, inspiring and very important. And it even gives us novelists a load of useful pointers about engaging our readers and why some types of story engage more than others. Scientists call it "narrative transportation". I love it the whole concept of narrative transportation. I read an article about it in Scientific American Mind last year and it's stayed with me ever since. What more could a writer want than that the reader be transported into the world we create? (Sarah - many thanks for the link to that! Last time I looked it wasn't on-line and I'm delighted that it now is. Thanks to SciamMind too.)

Go carry your readers away!

SUBMISSION SPOTLIGHT

How brave are you? Are you ready to let total strangers comment on your query / synopsis / proposal for your beloved Masterpiece? Because, I am offering you the chance to do just that.

On the basis that I trust that all comments will be given in the spirit of honest opinion with a view to helping rather than hindering or destroying, this is a chance to hold your work up for constructive criticism by your fellows. Many readers of this blog are well-published; some are agents and editors; and some may be deluded idiots who know nothing - I make no guarantees that everyone's opinion is equally valid.

But that is exactly what real readers are like: unpredictable and uncontrollable. Some future readers of your Work in Progress will not understand the depths or subtlety of your intellect or the meaningfulness of your Work. Some of them won't be able to tell the difference between a perfectly pitched voice and the ugly shriek of fighting cats. Get used to it.

Anyway, to the task. When you have fulfilled the criteria (below) for this mini-submission, email it to me at writingtutor@hotmail.co.uk (Please note: fabulously cool though it is, this is not my normal email address and I only look at it when I've got some blog-related competition or other foolishness going on.) Then, every now and then, I will pick one of the submissions and put it, lock, stock and barrel, on the blog. Then everyone will comment on it.

I won't necessarily pick the best or the worst - just one that I think will be interesting to study. It depends what I get from you. (I don't mean money, though that would be lovely: I mean it depends on the nature of your submissions.) And I'll maybe pick one every three weeks or so, so do keep them coming.

NOTE: as you know, there are differences between the US/UK/other countries in terms of what you put in your initial approach to an agent or publisher. In the US, for example, first approach is with a query letter only; and this query letter will therefore be fuller than a UK "covering letter", which would be very short and would accompany a full synopsis and the first pages of the actual work. For the purposes of this exercise, I am queen of my own imaginary country and am making my own rules, so please read them! (And, more importantly, when you actually submit something, please make sure you know what the requirements are in your country, by going onto some agent/publisher websites and reading the "submission guidelines".)

So, here are the criteria:

1. Unlike previous activities, this is not a joke. Your task is not to write a deliberately useless submission. You may address your submission to either publisher or agent - please make it clear which one.
2. Please send only the following: a perfectly pitched letter, selling your book and hooking the reader, making clear exactly what sort of book this is and describing it succinctly (something like this would work for both UK and elsewhere without much alteration); and no more than the first 500 words of your book. (You may wish to edit your actual work down so that your first 500 words work well enough.) Edited to add: pasted into body of email, please, NOT attachment.
   
3. The whole thing should be as perfect as you would send to a real agent/editor.
4. Please tell me your full name when you send you submission. However, I will not put your name on the blog, so please also offer a pseudonym. After the process is over and all comments are in, you may reveal your name but you do not have to.
   

When your fellow blog readers comment, the questions they will ask themselves are:

• Does this book sound really, really interesting?
• Does this writer seem to have real control over the written word?
• Is there something fresh and engaging about this writer's voice?

And now I am going to disappear to London for a few days. (Actually, I've gone already if this post goes out as planned on Thursday.) It's my last ever Society of Authors Management Committee meeting and the lovely Annual Awards Ceremony - introduced by Margaret Drabble and presented by Sebastian Faulks; and I'm seeing my older daughter one evening and my crime-writing friend, Aline Templeton, another evening. It would be entire bliss, except that I also have to prepare a scary radio thing for the weekend and a big speech and some workshops for the following week. So, if I don't reply quickly to your comments, that's why - but I will be watching you.

YOU ARE NOT READY - TRUST ME

I have surfaced from the Deathwatch Dash, briefly, before dashing to London tomorrow. Actually, despite my not really being here very much, I have a post half-done for you. Can't remember for the life of me what it's about. But anyway it doesn't matter because here is a very apt post from someone else in the meantime during (any Life of Brian fans will recognise that incongruous phrase ...). Agent Rachelle Gardner (no, not a member of the CIA - or maybe she is? Who knows? Or who would say?) says it absolutely all in this post.

See, really you don't need my whatever-it-was post: because you need to make your book better before you do anything with it. It's such an annoying message, isn't it? Because you think your work is good enough: it's not. I know. I am psychic. It's all this dashing about, gives me extra powers.

Even if you are good enough, think how much better you could be with some more honing. So, get honing.

The biggest mistake of unpublished authors is not being good enough within the genre in which they are writing. Despite the fact that lots of crap is published. But not by any reader of this blog, please.

I wore my turquoise boots yesterday, you'll be glad to know. And I can prove it.

THE NEW WRITER

When you read this, I will be exhausting myself on the dreaded Deathwatch Dash - please remind me to shut up next time I have stupid idea. It's not helped by suddenly having an ill daughter at home so I'm full of extra angst and stress, with the pleasures of the weekend rapidly fading.

Anyway, I'm not going to be able to blog particularly usefully or deeply for at least another week, for one reason and another. However, I have a little snippet to draw quickly to your attention.

There's a great magazine for writers, The New Writer, which many of you will know about. If you don't, take a look and do consider subscribing. I used to, years ago when I was trying to get published, and once I'd got published I stopped. (Which I needn't have done, as there's lots of stuff for published writers too, and besides, publication does not guarantee continued success).

I came across it again recently, still with the same hugely expert hands at the helm - Merric Davidson, Suzanne Ruthven and Sarah Jackson. It's full of great advice, lots of outlets for short story writing and poetry, and is an important source of information.

On the website, you'll see that you can ask for a free back issue to see what sort of things it contains. Give it a go. Lots of published writers have been through its pages and gleaned useful tips.

You may detect lack of humour, spark and crabbitness in this post. Sorry about that - I am seriously stressed about the coming week. I have put a note above my desk, saying, "JUST SAY NO".

BIG MISTAKE 2: PROBLEMS WITH PACE

I promised that I would soon hit you with a post which would improve your writing. Big Mistake 1, you'll doubtless remember, was back in February, when I talked about making mistakes with voice. This Big Mistake "series" aims to point you towards the commonest mistakes in otherwise decent manuscripts, the things that so often stop them pressing the necessary ecstasy buttons for an editor or agent to say "OH YES!"

This lesson is aimed at already decent writers, not those whose writing is at a level of direness which you cannot imagine. (Unless you've seen a website that I recently gawped at. Put it this way: supposing its author decided to go down the vanity publishing route; this would be a) the only way she stands a chance of getting published and b) akin to Medusa paying for some glamour photos to be done as a birthday present to herself.)

Sorry, but I needed to get that off my chest. There are some seriously deluded idiots out there; please tell me you are not among them.

Anyway. Pace is one of the things that perfectly decent writers often fail to analyse in their own work and is, thankfully, one of the easiest things to fix. In fact, so easily might you be able to fix it, that I would not be surprised if this post alone does not propel at least one of you to publication. Go, go, go! If one of you gets published, I will feel like a midwife, which would be rather lovely (in some ways, though not in others). I could get to be at the birth - otherwise known as champagne-drenched launch party.

What is pace? Where will you find it?
Pace is not always fast; nor does it have to be. Pace consists of controlling the variety of speeds with which the action happens and with which the reader reads. And you find it in any book where you keep wanting to turn the page.

Hold onto that thought because it's your ability to make the reader want to turn the page, instead of just turning down the corner of it prior to going to sleep, which is your whole aim as an author. Regardless of whether you write crime fiction or romance, kids' books, comedy, literary fiction or whatever - including non-fiction - you want your readers to keep going. And if you get the pace wrong, they won't.

Clearly, some books move faster than others. Some genres require a faster pace throughout: action stories, thrillers, books for teenagers, chick-lit - all require more foot on the accelerator more of the time, because that's what their readers are there for.

But no readers respond well to a constant fast pace. After all, if it's fast all the time, how do you get your reader's heart racing faster for your climactic scenes? How do you create suspense if every page is a sprint? You must play with the reader. You must think: where do I want the reader to become breathless with anticipation? When will I allow him to relax before upping the pace again? How many times will I do this and how often? If we have a really fast bit here, what happens when we get to the scene later which I want to be even more intense and dramatic?

So, pace is about control. Pace is a tool, one of the most important tools in keeping the reader going. Now, I can't decide for you where your fast or slow bits should come, because I don't know your story-line. (Please don't tell me). Only you know that, and it should be obvious to you. But, once you have worked out which are your big scenes and paciest bits, I can give you some tips for how to control the pace at those times.

Technique 1 - chapter ends
You can change the whole pace of a section (or whole book) by simply changing where you end your chapters. Think of a chapter as a breath. If your chapter depicts a complete episode, the reader starts by inhaling, reaches the top of the breath (the climax of the episode), then exhales to the end of the chapter, at which point he relaxes. And quite possibly turns out the light and goes to sleep. Which is fine - your reader needs to sleep. But, what if you don't want him to sleep now? What if this is supposed to be a fast bit where you want your readers breathless with excitement? Simple: end your chapter mid-breath. So, end it before the climax, at a point where the reader cannot relax. Do that a few times, and you've created a really fast-moving section. You've upped the pace. Try it: go through your book messing around with your chapter ends.

Technique 2 - chapter lengths
Fast sections = short chapters. Simple. Make the reader sit up. Make the reader read another one. Can't stop themselves. Just one more. And one more. And now they're really into the story. You've got 'em.

Technique 3 - sentence lengths
One common mistake of not-good-enough writers is having sentences that are all the same length. (And same structure, but we'll tackle that another day.) It slows everything down (if they're all quite long) and makes it monotonous (even if all short and breathless). The simple rule is: short when you want to increase the pace. Again, it's about breathlessness.

You can also extend the technique to paragraph lengths. So, for a particularly dramatic fast bit, you might have a series of very short sentences, each on a new line. I did this in my next novel (not Deathwatch - the next one, Wasted.) Let me show you, and bear in mind that this is the most dramatic moment of the book, which the reader has been waiting for for a long time:

There is a moment of emptiness. It is a fraction of space, when one thing ends and another begins. Laughter stops, punched in the face, shocked.

Jess’s body freezes.

Breath holds.

One jetski.

It is coming.

Straight.

Towards.

The beach.

Jack is standing now. His back to the sea.

Grinning.

The rider’s face. Laughing.

But then.

Terrified.

Trying to turn.

Screaming.

A spray of froth.

A flash of red.

OK, that's a bit extreme but this is a novel where much of the book has a dreamlike, headachey quality, a thick summer feel with the menace of thunder, and when I need to gear up I use what I call the Ferrari Method - (well, I'm calling it that now) - a super turbo-charged shock to the reader. That particular example shows something else about Ferraris - you can hear them coming, but there's not enough time to get out of the way. The build up of short sentences lets you know, absolutely know, that something horrible is just about to happen.

Alternatively, you could also use Fire-cracker method, where the short sentences come out of the blue, in the middle of some long sentences. Earlier in Wasted, I do this when a pigeon flies through the window ... (Something of which, as you know, I have considerable experience). I give absolutely no warning of this and both my agent and editor commented on this as being the most shocking moment because the reader is not ready. Bearing in mind that there are a considerable number of far more shocking moments, a pigeon is doing a pretty good job if it over-takes human disaster on the shock stakes.

Technique 4 - controlling tense
Now, this isn't exactly a technique but it's something that affects pace in ways which are worth looking at. The easier tenses to handle are the past tenses. No one has a problem with these. Using the present tense is much trickier, and creates its own atmosphere which is (surprisingly?) not always one of greater speed and immediacy. It can sometimes feel detached. So, with the present tense, you need to be even cleverer about controlling pace. I don't recommend the present tense unless you really know what you're doing. There are too many pitfalls and many readers are put off by it.

Whichever tense you are using, Technique 5 comes into play.

Technique 5 - chopping words
When you want a particular section to feel very immediate, you could omit bits of sentences altogether, usually subjects, articles, or finite verbs. Don't do this too much, or it becomes irritating; and if you do it, as I do, it needs to be a recognised part of your style, not something you just inserted for effect on page 178.) Here's a bit from Deathwatch. The bits in red are where I've left words out, deliberately to increase pace. The bit in blue is technique 6.

The towpath was narrow here, backed by a high wall. No escape. She looked behind her. The barge was nearly at this bank. She could just make out the figure of the woman at the helm. Hear her voice but not her words. She didn’t want to hear her words.

She ran, pummelling the air, cold wind in her throat, rain running down her face, pain in her lungs. Straining to hear any sounds behind her. No sound of the boat, not any more. It must be at the bank. The woman would be leaping off. She would be only seconds behind."

Technique 6 - running phrases
That sentence in blue could have been separate "sentences". (Yes, I know, not technically sentences, since they lack finite verbs, but I could have separated them with full-stops/periods). And that would work too. But in some ways this method creates a smoother speed, not a jerky breathless one. Here, the character is running sucessfully - she feels powerful. If I'd made them separate staccato sentences, I'd have created a more breathless and desperate effect, but I'm saving that for later ...

Please don't think I'm setting myself up as in any way a perfect writer. No, no, no. I look all my published books, including the new one which is looking at me accusingly right now, and think, "ARGHHH, why didn't I change that bit or notice this bit?" No, what I want to do is show you how carefully you have to look at your writing at every level, from overall structure down to individual word and punctuation point, in order to be in control of your pace.

See, if you can't control your pace with absolute precision, you've lost your reader. And, published or unpublished, you cannot afford to do that.

Now, on a personal note, I am feeling very much under pressure, and not for any reason you might guess. Last night, I was accosted in a bar (in the nicest possible way), by a very interesting and personable person who asked me if I was Nicola Morgan, "because" she read my blog. We then had a really good chat, but what was disconcerting was that she said she recognised me from my boots. Considering that the boots in question have never featured in this blog (though others have), this was remarkable. Anyway, she said she knew I'd be in this bar because I'd put it on Twitter and on my blog, and she thought to herself, "Hmm, if Nicola is there, she'll be bound to be wearing great boots." So, she must have gone around the bar looking at everyone's feet. I feel a little like Cinderella.

Anyway, if I'm going to be held to account by the gloriousness of my boots, this puts me under some extra pressure, to which there is really only one answer: I'd really better go and buy some more.

SOME TRUTHS ABOUT PUBLISHING

I was/am halfway through writing a Very Useful Post for you, on the important subject of controlling pace. I know you must be on tenterhooks about this but meanwhile I just came across a Very Useful and Thought-Provoking Post by someone else.

I am going to post that VUTPP here, before my own words of wisdom tomorrow or Wednesday, not because I am derelicting my duty to you, but because amongst many true points in his piece, Joshua Mohr makes one in particular: "I need only concern myself with one thing: the quality of my writing. That isn’t chance at all. I can’t control marketing trends or debutantes, but I can control the amount of energy I put into my revision process. I can take my time and make sure to write the best book I can."

I cannot tell you how right he is and what a wise decision he has made. Well, in fact, I can tell you. And indeed am. Otherwise, why would I be writing this post?

One of my most trenchant beliefs is that too many unpublished writers take up too much time too early trying to find out how to approach publishers/agents, and not enough time early enough accepting that they have to improve their writing first.

Anyway, trust me, it's the writing what counts, and only when we've got that right is it worth approaching a publisher or agent. Before that, it's embarrassing, because one of two things will happen: a) you'll be rejected or b) you'll have your rubbishy writing published and be mortified when the reviews appear. Or don't appear.

Joshua also says: "Turns out, chance is a brutal part of the publishing trade. Good books sometimes vanish without a trace, and obvious, dumbed-down books with clever marketing tricks often become successful. It’s a savage reality of the business, one writers need to be aware of."

Again, spot on. Or "back of the net", as we say over here, which I once had to explain to my transatlantic friends.

So, since chance plays a big part, would any of us make that chance even smaller by not making our writing as good as possible and doing absolutely everything necessary to do so? Only the deluded idiots amongst us. And there are some, but surely they're not still reading this blog? I aimed to frighten them off long ago. Which is good, because one of them won't see what I'm planning to say about her/him in my forthcoming Very Useful Post.

(Edited to add: Sally Zigmond makes the same point over on The Elephant in the Writing-Room about the need to work more on our writing before expecting publication. She is another author who deserves to succeed. I didn't mention this at first because I am still blushing about her kind words about me in it, but I decided that it was more important that I send you over to her blog anyway. She has lots of useful insights. In fact, the very title of her blog makes the point: that the thing that is staring us in the face but which we too often don't talk about enough is the need to write better.)

Meanwhile, there's a lot we can learn from Joshua's blog post and I wish him success with Some Things That Meant The World To Me. I also wish success to Two Dollar Radio, the small independent publisher which is publishing Joshua because they believe in the quality of his writing even if bigger houses didn't think the book would sell enough to satisfy them. Which is not to knock big publishing houses either - big houses have big heating bills - but simply to say that there are plenty of readers out there who want something a bit special and I care that all types of book and reader should be catered for.

Anyway, my point in offering you his wisdom, apart from its obvious truth, is to prepare you for the fact that my next post will really be a writing lesson. Unless something else comes up, of course. I know I should be thinking about book launches, but I've got to have something to take my mind off the Litopia interviews that are going out this week. I don't know what I said - it's all a blur, largely because marauding dogs were running around behind me, dragging heavy chains in quite a threatening way, which is not something I'm used to in the genteel part of Morningside in which I live.