One of the techniques I learned in a course on writing a psychological thriller was to strip a chapter of everything except action and dialog, as if it was a screenplay. Ideally, even with so little information, the reader has enough to construct the world of the story in their mind. The point of doing this is:

1. Pacing – stripped of all description and interiority, all that’s left is characters speaking and acting.

2. Hooking the reader – by leaving out any character description or interiority about why something is being said, the reader has to work a bit harder to glean who these characters really are.

3. Characterization – When actions and words are all characters have to express themselves, they tend to shine more, as if their essence has been squeezed through a filter.

4. Extranea – If you have four people in a scene, and only two of them have speaking parts, it becomes really obvious you probably don’t need the other two.

5. Plot Structure – this is effectively an X-ray of the story, allowing you to see “what happens” and nothing more.

Obviously, this is a less helpful technique when trying to write literary fiction, but even if you’re not writing genre fiction, this is a great way to find what I call the bones of a story.

Most commercial fiction tends to have the following underlying structure:

But like Matryoshka dolls, the skeletal structure of a story is often duplicated, in smaller form, several times within a novel or TV series.

Recently, I watched the first episode of Homeland, specifically for the story’s bones. The premise of the show is:

When CIA agent Carrie Mathison’s unorthodox investigation in Iraq leads to a serious diplomatic incident, she’s assigned to a desk job. Then she hears that an American PoW in Iraq has been ‘turned’...

Let’s take a look at the opening. Once the scene has been set via subtitle to Baghdad, we hear:

There’s a story right here, and we can see its bones:

1. A man blows up 129 civilians in a marketplace in Iraq.

2. With American CIA help, he is caught and held as a prisoner for 3 months, protecting himself with the intel he has.

3. Something major shifts in the broader U.S.-Iraq landscape, and…

4. Overnight, he is sentenced to death, and even the CIA can’t save him. They come to a literal screeching halt trying to get to him.

The logical structure here (for these < 5 minutes) is most closely one of kishotenketsu – (1) Introduction (2) Development (3) Twist (4) Conclusion. This story is delivered to us through the dialog and action alone, knowing nothing more about who these characters are. We get that in the next minute. Despite Carrie begging him to get her access to Assan, he shuts her down and hangs up, leaving her stranded, and she heads to the prison alone.

We get another story’s bones, too, through just the 5-minute phonecall:

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Sometimes, I read the opening of a story that’s got all the elements it’s supposed to, and yet I’m bored. Strong, unique voice. Opening in the middle of action. Compelling world-building. Excellent writing. And yet, I don’t care. My eyes glaze over by Page 2. And I don’t know why.

And then it happened to me with one of my own books. I left one of my (many) WIP novels to ferment for ~3 months so that I could edit it with some perspective. But I couldn’t fall back into it at all. I’ve heard others say they can sometimes feel sick of a novel they’ve been working on for a long time, and I recognized that what I felt was something similar: not quite sick of it, but more like it was sick, and I was a helpless parent unable to heal it.

Hopefully any parent with a sick child having a mysterious illness goes to the doctor immediately. But as an author, taking a book to a doctor feels fraught – what if they tell you it’s terminal? What if the issue is something you could have caught earlier if you were a better writer? So we poke and prod, tell ourselves it’s not that bad, or try something fresh – a rewrite, a new perspective, a change of plot, something that will bring the novel out of its coma.

Recently, I decided to take that book to the doctor, but in a very roundabout way. I enrolled in a class on screenwriting, and rewrote the first half of the novel as the pilot of a TV show. Writing a screenplay is an extremely liberating experience, and it’s also great when you want to sort out pacing problems. Without long paragraphs of monologue and thinking, the only things on the page are people’s words and actions. So, I wrote out Act One of the TV pilot version of my novel, and submitted that for feedback.

Here’s what I got back:

My biggest problem as I read and reread your pages was that I simply never felt connected to the story or the characters. A whole bunch of stuff happens in this act, most of which should be really interesting – assassinations and magic and sex and all sorts of coolness. But no matter how many times I reread, I could never get it to mean anything. I just didn’t care because I didn’t understand why anyone was doing anything or what it meant. I had no clue about what was at stake.

It might seem counterintuitive, but the first thing I felt when I read this was relief. YES, you see it! The child is sick! I thought I was going crazy!

Naming the elephant in the room tends to shrink it. We have a diagnosis. Now we can make real progress.

Okay, but how?

Step 1: Grieve

It’s very tempting to want to fix a problem as soon as you see it. Many of us are Type-A high-achievers, and the idea that there’s a glaring problem that’s unsolved, or a mess that nobody is cleaning up, sets all of our nerves on fire. But acting on feedback when it hasn’t had time to settle and be internalized only puts us back in old patterns. The same old patterns that led to the problem in the first place. It’s like trying to solve malaria by running around with hot water and towels, and then leaving that water to cool overnight and gather more mosquitoes.

I’m actually terrible at grieving. The idea of doing nothing but sitting with my feelings repulses me. Surely there are better ways to spend my time? I could be working, reading, writing, editing, exercising! Literally anything that allows me not to sit with the fact that a novel that I’ve now spent years on is sick and I don’t yet know how to fix it.

Shocker: it’s exactly this avoidance of feeling, this bias to action, that led to the problems in the novel in the first place. As the instructor said later in their feedback:

You dive right into the action and various conflicts. And in a lot of scripts that would be a good thing. But here you are depriving us of everything we need to get involved in your story. I strongly urge you to rethink this pilot. Don’t feel compelled to get as much story told as quickly as possible. Let us live with your world and your characters.

This line – Don’t feel compelled to get as much story told as quickly as possible – should be on a post-it above my laptop screen. It’s probably a good life-lesson too, for someone who tends to pack 5 countries into a single vacation, who thought it was a good idea for a single 24-hour birthday to involve a dinner, several hours of dancing, an early morning horse ride and a trip to LA. The feedback boils down to Slow down; stay in the moment, which points to a sickness in the author too, not just the novel.

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Step 2: Integrate

It’s very common for the rational mind to argue with feedback. It’s a defense mechanism. Here are the things that either your own mind or the voices around you are likely to say when feedback comes in that is challenging:

• That’s just one person’s view; that doesn’t make it true.

• What do they know? They’re (a) in a different genre (b) in a different medium (c) not an authority

• But everyone else says to get to the action quickly, to keep it pacy

• I don’t understand what they’re talking about – the stakes are so obvious!

• Maybe they just can’t relate to the protagonist because they’re a different gender / age / race etc.

• The feedback isn’t actionable; it’s just pointing out what’s wrong, not how to fix it.

All of these rationalizations are valid – but they point to mental resistance. The mind hates contradictions. On the surface, “Get to the action quickly” and “Don’t feel compelled to get as much story told as quickly as possible” seem contradictory. It’s easy to dismiss one data point in favor of the other. But the greatest leaps forward come when you can integrate multiple contradictory perspectives. True for writing and for life.

What might an integration look like here? Once you put yourself in the mindset that there must be an integration, it’s easy to find one. Mine comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous quote:

Let’s say that you’re writing an epic story about someone lost on a distant planet, desperate to return home. When does the action start? When they get on the doomed shuttle? When they get left behind? How do you convey the stakes quickly and make people care, but also not get so much story told as fast as possible?

The structure of the first chapter of Andy Weir’s The Martian is a great study for this. It begins with:

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[Aside: it kills me that the second line of the quote is usually missing a definite article. Then THE queen died of grief! This is not a one-off thing. See Exhibits A, B and C]

After some research, I realize Forster may have been wrong with this quote, but he was using it to refute someone else (Percy Lubbock) who was even more wrong. Lubbock was arguing for a strict, formulaic novel that was structured, very “show-don’t-tell,” with some pretty strong technical rules. Forster is siding with H. G. Wells (another author I love) who says, “life should be given the preference, and must not be whittled or distended for a pattern’s sake.” i.e. Let the story breathe.

The fascinating argument between the structuralists, including Henry James, and the intuitive storytellers Forster+Wells (you can tell I’m choosing sides here) ate up a few hours of my weekend, but this quote from the article is far more aligned to how I think about writing:

‘My own prejudices are with Wells,’ says Forster, who believed there were no limits to what you could do in a novel so long as you got away with it.

A recent discussion with my writing group on where to start a novel and what’s the “inciting incident” made me think about my own journey: writing intuitively at first, then applying narrative structure, then breaking the formula because my intuition tells me to.

The first draft of my first novel, Driving by Starlight, was written unconsciously in the Forster style – ultra-realistic, true to life, and held together only by the notion of consequence. The king died and then the queen died of grief. Shit happens (inciting incident), and then because of what happened before, something new happens. The plot falls like an avalanche from the inciting incident.

Then I got feedback from my agent that it was lacking narrative structure. She recommended I read Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, which blew my mind. Was every screenplay really that formulaic, as to have exactly the same beats?

I supposed it would have to be, to hit the commercials or running time at exactly those points. It felt mechanistic, but as I started watching and studying some of my favorite films, I realized how narrative structure becomes a recognizable skeleton that gives you faith in the storytelling. Every story has a different shape, just as every person is different, but if it has the beats, it’s recognizable as a story and builds anticipation about what’s going to happen.

I rewrote Driving by Starlight and it was accepted for publication. I was eager to learn how to apply the formula. When writing Her Golden Coast, I deconstructed Thelma and Louise and Yuri on Ice. My hypothesis was correct – both these extremely different stories have the exact same skeletal structure, as does Her Golden Coast. I didn’t find the formula constraining, because it was at so abstract a level that I could turn it into all kinds of plot.

Maybe that’s what Henry James thought too, that the novel’s formula was so abstract it could encompass all stories. You just substituted your specific plot events for x and y. Or, in the case of Save the Cat, 15 beats that created the right pacing across your story without dragging in the middle.

But over time, even though I didn’t feel constrained by the idea of a narrative framework, I definitely felt… bored. I wanted to tell the story a particular way, but that would make the story 200,000 words long. Or, I wanted to write a series, but serial stories don’t fit the novel structure. I highly recommend reading Kim Boo York’s book on the subject or listening to her on this podcast.

I’ve since been exploring alternatives that would allow me to take what I’ve learned about structure, but still be able to write freely. This week, a writing instructor kept asking me what the story was, and whatever I replied with he said was the plot. I felt haunted by Forster. What really is the difference?

Yesterday, I had a breakthrough.

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It’s not about brevity, which does take work, thank you Mark Twain / Blaise Pascal / whoever ended up writing long letters because they were too busy to write short ones. It’s about salience.

What matters about a story enough to convey in a 1-page synopsis or a 1-sentence logline? Finding out takes something that’s impossible when you’re writing a novel: reading it for the first time. If you’re the author of a story, you cannot see it as a first-time reader.

So, how do you do these things? Honestly, most writers don’t. We put it off to the bitter end, send something off with our queries, and hate it two days later. I’m also guessing that a lot of people these days use AI to summarize their plot into the synopsis. The writing community is deeply split into those who would never touch AI for any part of their writing, those who write with AI, and those who won’t use AI for writing but will use it for things like query letters, synopses etc. because “It’s not the creative part.”

I’m not here to argue whether writing a synopsis is creative or not. I will assert that it takes a completely different mindset than writing a novel. But that mindset is pretty damn important, and not one I want to outsource to AI. It’s also not an afterthought, but pretty central to writing the novel in the first place. Here’s why.

If you can’t write the synopsis, you don’t have a story; you have things that happen.

Good stories are memorable. That is their ONE JOB. Our brains are wired for story, because story is how we make sense of the world, learn survival skills, and connect to others. We remember Red Riding Hood and know better than to trust strangers. Every religion counts on story to get people to remember what is and isn’t allowed and that actions have consequences.

If you can’t rattle off what happens in your story, you don’t have a chain of dominoes where actions have consequences. You don’t have characters who behave in ways that real people would understand. If you find yourself going, “Well, I know that in Chapter Thirteen, they go to the hospital, but I don’t remember why; someone got hurt, I think…” you’ve literally lost the plot.

Write your synopsis once every three months to see if it still hangs together the same. It doesn’t have to be well-written, or creative. It has to be logical. If new / different things happen every time you write your synopsis, the plotting and characterization aren’t tight enough. Too many things are possible.

Writing your synopsis early and often can tell you why your novel’s struggling, especially in the middle.

We’ve all hit that messy middle, where something doesn’t feel right, and the characters are refusing to do what you need them to do. They curl up to watch TV when they should fight, or they shout at each other and yet there’s no tension. You know it, but you don’t know why.

Every editor will try to tell you about raising the stakes. At some point that phrase became so inherent to writing that I forgot it comes from gambling. I don’t gamble. I don’t need the drama in my life. But that drama, of looming dread, is exactly what writing needs. Here’s the thing about a gamble – it’s going to end, one way or another, and you’re locked in until it does.

When you’ve got a story that is truly high-stakes, you don’t have a dragging middle. You can’t. Writing the synopsis compresses the gamble. It should feel electrifying to write one. If it doesn’t, you’ve got to raise the stakes in your story.

Writing a good logline can tell you what your story is really about.

Here are some loglines for popular movies. Isn’t it fascinating how many of these you can identify just from a single sentence? (source, for more loglines)

Why are we talking about loglines? This is a movie thing, yes? Why should a novelist care? Even if you could use a good hooky logline to query agents and publishers, maybe you don’t want to think about that yet, while you’re still writing your novel.

I really, really wish someone had sat my debut author ass down and told me to write a logline before writing my book. I probably wouldn’t have had to rewrite it four times. I’ve written something like six novels now (three published), and I still learn something about my WIP novel every time I attempt a logline.

It’s also really nice, on those days when the writing doesn’t come easy, to say, “Okay, the scenes just aren’t flowing. Let me work on the logline instead. My goal for the next 30 minutes is to write 1 sentence.”

Now let’s look at why the loglines above work, and what that tells us about the structure of a compelling story.

Jaws

Who are we identifying with?

I like this one because there isn’t a single protagonist. Honestly, I think we’re supposed to identify with “a beach community.” Anyone who has ever been in the ocean knows to be afraid of killer sharks. This is not a remote fear. It’s immediate. It’s the kind of thing I might experience this summer.

Who are we rooting for?

I don’t know that any of the three listed jobs gives me a ton of confidence they can handle a killer shark. What’s the sheriff supposed to do, shoot the shark? Water renders bullets pretty ineffective. I don’t know that these three wildly different people can get their shit together enough to deal with this. Given how my local council dealt with the pandemic, I’m going to be biting my nails if this happened in my beach town.

What outcome do we want?

We want the shark gone! Now! Isn’t that obvious? The story doesn’t end until the shark dies! This clarity is important because here are things you now know cannot happen in this story:

1. The shark decides to take a detour to another beach. Problem solved.

2. The shark keeps eating children who go into the water until it dies of old age.

3. Killing the shark is easy. The sheriff takes an assault rifle and shoots it on the first try.

What are the stakes?

Life and death.

Let’s try another:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Who are we identifying with?

Note that the genders of the couple are absent from the logline. At this point, we’re identifying with both partners in this relationship. Who hasn’t had a relationship go sour? Pretty universal experience. Wanting those memories gone is a desire many can identify with.

Who are we rooting for?

Whichever partner in the couple we identify with the most – every breakup has a winner.

What outcome do we want?

Let’s not kid ourselves. We want the couple to get back together. The tension between wanting to remember and wanting to forget is the epitome of heartbreak. We want to know there was enough good to outweigh the bad – for both of us.

What are the stakes?

Love and heartbreak.

Let’s do one more:

Inception

Who are we identifying with?

I chose this one because it’s ornery. Most of us don’t usually identify with a thief who commits corporate espionage. Hopefully. This is an anti-hero protagonist, which also tells you that you’re going to have to work extra hard to make them likable and relatable. They need to have a huge heart to make up for that twitchy moral compass.

Who are we rooting for?

While most of us may not be corporate spies, in either the dream world or the real one, many of us have wanted to plant an idea into the mind of a boss / person with power and authority. I’d love to plant a love for gay sex into the minds of certain tyrannical national leaders. Despite the protagonist being a thief, there’s a part of us that is morally grey enough to consider that sometimes the ends justify the means.

We find out more about this when we get to the trailer for the movie, which has an interesting emphasis. There’s absolutely no talk of what this idea is that Leonardo diCaprio is going to plant into the CEO’s mind. The CEO himself is pretty incidental.

The key is this line: “I think I found a way home. And this last job… that’s how I get there.” Combine that with the montage of him crying and a dead / dying love interest, and now you’re invested for a different reason – you care about the thief as a person and want him to succeed. It helps that he has a team of people with doe-eyes and baby cheeks.

The movie trailer is the equivalent of a writer’s query / synopsis – it gives you enough of the flavor of the whole.

What outcome do we want?

We want the heist to be a success. Success gives the thief “a way home” and failure means death or prison.

What are the stakes?

It’s tempting to say Success and Failure, but that’s just the means. The end is the same as everything else: success in the heist leads to life, love and happiness. Failure leads to heartbreak, imprisonment and/or death.

I chose these because they’re sufficiently varied. Not always a singular protagonist in a life-or-death struggle against a clear antagonist. But despite the variation, there are clear similarities, that tell us a few things about what readers need to know to have an interest in the story:

If you’re not able to describe your own story in these terms, it’s the story that’s weak, not the synopsis.

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As part of this week’s study in salience, I’m going to dissect what kept me reading until it didn’t, and what tripped me up enough to give up. I want to be clear that this isn’t going to be one of those Goodreads-style DNF takedowns. I respect the author and what he’s trying to do, and the book is clearly popular. But there’s a chemistry that exists between the author and the reader, and this one simply failed to spark it to life.

The book is Adam Kay’s A Particularly Nasty Case. Kay rose to fame for This is going to hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor on the NHS front line. In A Particularly Nasty Case, Kay turns his hand to fiction, with a doctor called Eitan Rose who’s just returning to work after an episode of bipolar disorder. When a toxic hospital consultant dies of an apparent heart attack, fellow doctor Eitan Rose suspects foul play. But nobody believes him – they think he’s having another episode.

I heard Kay talk about what he was trying to do here, showing the extent to which doctors separate mental and physical health and have toxic attitudes about the former. It’s why I bought the book, and everything I heard about it added to my feeling of “OMG this book was written just for me!”

So, to start with, let’s talk about why I felt that.

What compelled me about the book

Premise + theme

I love the psychological thriller aspect of Is he really having an episode or is there more to the heart attack? I love that someone who shone a light on the absurd expectations and the hypocrisy of the NHS is continuing to do important work for the mental health of doctors.

The protagonist is gay

I just prefer reading about queer characters (she says, after writing several of them). I’ll do a whole other post someday on what kinds of queer characters I prefer reading about, but will say here that Eitan Rose is one of them — he’s not figuring himself out, he’s not a saint, he’s not ashamed or in the closet. He’s out and proud, complex and multi-faceted, and the story isn’t about him being gay.

It’s set in London

Going back to my previous post, where the key to making the reader care is to strike a chord with who they are – their identity, their values or their situation. I’m not a gay man, but I do share the same values as the author, and I live in London. Hey, there’s even a dominatrix in a postcode near me! But I do enjoy references to places I’ve been.

The voice is funny…

Here’s are the opening lines:

This wasn’t Cheers. Eitan wasn’t looking for the kind of bar where everybody knows your name. He wanted the sort of anonymity you’d normally only achieve by soldering off your fingerprints and buying a Bolivian passport on the dark web.

I love this kind of voice. Relaxed, self-assured and wry. It’s funny… until it isn’t.

Which takes us to why, despite all this, I’m not going to finish the book. What could make me stop caring?

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At the yearly Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, I was amazed at the turnout and engagement. Thousands of people descended on a small town, swarmed the bookshops and cafes, and – as I learned from the surrounding conversations – talked constantly about the books they’d been reading. Books they loved and couldn’t put down. Crime, mystery and thriller in all forms – procedural, with cops and detectives; speculative or historical, set in space or in the last millennium, domestic and psychological or spies and thieves.

Throughout the conference, everyone from newbie writers to decades-long professional authors said the same thing – it’s really hard to stand out in this market. Hard to catch and hold the reader’s attention. I’ve been studying pacing, tension and suspense, trying to figure out what the secret is that will make my stories unputdownable.

Spoiler: it’s not cliffhangers. It’s not vague dum-dum-dum “If she knew that would be the last time she’d see him, she wouldn’t have said that.” It’s not a gun pointed at someone’s head.

It’s about how fast you can make me give a shit about what’s at stake for someone I care about.

There are three aspects of that sentence we’re going to break down, with examples. In reverse order:

• Who is the someone and why do I care about them?

• What’s at stake for them and why does it matter to them?

• Why do their stakes matter to me, the reader?

We’ll start with the first example, from S. Hussain Zaidi’s The Mafia Queens of Mumbai:

• Who is the someone and why do I care about them?

Madhu remains unnamed until the end of the paragraph. This choice to have her be an unnamed “she” for as long as possible builds resonance with any reader who identifies as a woman. Reading is an exercise in empathy, and until she is named, she is me. That lack of distance sinks us into the story – and into the body that is “forced” to wait in a garish red dress with painted lips and a garish nose ring – wait for what?

• What’s at stake for them and why does it matter to them?

Immediately, we’re introduced to the stakes. Jumping POVs (taking the omniscient perspective) is certainly a choice – one that is more common in Eastern storytelling. Rather than the claustrophobia of a single perspective, you are introduced to multiple people who each exert their own control over the story. In this book, in particular, men are always threatening to steal focus. The men of the Mumbai mafia are violent and charismatic, impulsive in some ways (easy to goad into reckless behavior or fury) and high integrity in others (devotion to family and faith).

The women are always at risk of being overpowered by them – sexually, physically and narratively. By the end of the second paragraph, we’re thinking, Shit, I don’t want to be in this rapist’s head another moment. And just then, Madhu wrenches it back. She is vulnerable – naive, sixteen, feeling naked – but in control over her senses. She remembers the advice she was given, not to cry out because it would make things worse. What’s at stake is death, and Madhu is a survivor.

• Why do their stakes matter to me, the reader?

Great for her. Why do I care? So far, this story has done all the same things that The Talented Mr. Ripley did, or any other well-written opening. Practically formulaic. At the Harrogate festival, we even got a template, with a checklist. # 1 on the Checklist is Give readers something to root for:

• The reader knows who or what matters most to the protagonist

• The threatened loss is specific, personal and emotionally meaningful.

• The story has shown why this matters before placing it under threat.

• The emotional stakes would still matter without physical danger.

The last of these is very interesting. Yes, the stakes of a sixteen-year-old girl about to be raped by a drunk man are pretty high. But even without the immediate physical danger, consider that last paragraph. This is a woman with high agency, who defied her parents, eloped with a man and moved to a whole new city. She’s strong. But she’s been betrayed by the man she loves, and the emotional stakes there add a whole lot more dramatic tension than the drunk Jaggan seth.

That’s where I’m hooked. Until then, it’s just another story about shitty things happening to yet another woman. But I know a thing or two about being high agency when it comes to matters of the heart, as well as being betrayed. Even though I have nothing in common with a sex worker in Mumbai, this is no longer a story about someone else, it’s a story about me.

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To make the reader care, the story has to be about them in some way. I made a Venn diagram, because I’m a huge nerd.

Identity

This is the easiest in some ways and the hardest in others. Write about a white man or a white woman, and you have magical access to a broad readership. There’s a reason publishing is so white. The publishing professionals are mostly white, and the books being published reflect the market they know how to reach: white readers. At the writing festival I mentioned earlier, probably 20 out of 1000 people were women of color.

Writing an identity that’s more niche or marginalized means a drop in readership. There aren’t that many people ready to identify with sixteen-year-old Madhu, compared to the number of people who would love to identify with a single white woman with a midlife crisis and a lot of money. Connection to a character because of their identity is both real and aspirational – we read the people we wish we were.

Values

Sometimes, the “people we wish we were” goes beyond the usual aspects of identity (gender, race, sexuality, etc.) and into people who become moral lighthouses. This is why we love “triumph of the human spirit” stories (although I really hate that phrase). We can see ourselves in Forrest Gump’s perseverance, in Katniss’ dogged devotion, or in Odysseus’ intelligence (more on that later). When we find that moral resonance, we read because we want to know what would happen if we, too, lived our values more completely. If we fought for the world we wanted, would we succeed? We read the choices we wish we could make.

This is why anti-heroes and unlikable protagonists are a challenge. It’s a step further to put ourselves in the shoes of someone we despise, and at any point we might decide the person is beyond redemption and give up. Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and R. F. Kuang’s June Hayward (Yellowface) are not characters you root for, but rather root against, waiting for a payoff that vindicates your belief in justice. You want them to get what’s coming to them, and rage-read until that happens. In Nolan’s The Odyssey, Robert Pattinson plays the treacherous Antinous and does it so well that you watch his scenes counting the crimes for which he must pay. Making the reader (or viewer) care here hinges on trust – the reader must believe that actions will have consequences.

Situation

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I’m at a conference right now: the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, where Agatha Christie famously disappeared for eleven days. Even today, at the panel titled From Poirot to Podcasts, people wonder why she disappeared.

To me, it’s so obvious I don’t understand why it’s still a mystery. Christie, like most crime writers (most writers) wanted to control the world. We write fiction to bring order, moral justice, or meaning to the fictional world in a way that the real world fails to do. Agatha Christie’s husband had just asked her for a divorce. Of course she went on a psychic fugue. She wanted an escape from her life. Honestly, I think we’d all benefit from a few days of not being ourselves. That is why, after all, I show up to these conferences despite hating them – I am a different person here, and once in a while it’s good for me.

But years of these conferences have taught me how to get only what I need without stressing too much about the rest of it. Last year, at this festival, I fought my introversion to listen to Attica Locke, got to meet Lee Child, and cultivated the seeds of my latest novel, a psychological thriller.

Here are five things I get out of these conferences, and the work I’ve done to get them without the side-effects.

1. Pitching your novel without a panic attack

Nearly every conference I’ve been to offers some version of this. The Writers Digest conference does a Pitch Slam where you can get feedback from 5-7 agents in person with a 90-second verbal pitch. Jericho Writers does it on Twitter/X, and Theakston does a “Dragons’ Den” where names drawn out of a lottery get to pitch their novel for 2 minutes to four publishing professionals to get feedback.

If you hate public speaking, talking about your book, deadlines, or getting constructive feedback (especially in front of a large group of people) this is hell (and why it’s called Dragons’ Den). The first time I did this, I wrote my pitch two weeks in advance, asked all my friends for feedback, memorized the pitch, practiced the delivery, and timed it. Yesterday, I wrote my pitch in the morning, read it once before pitching, and then just delivered it. It was the best I’d ever done it.

Getting skin thick enough to make pitching feel natural takes years. Listening to other people pitch and hearing the feedback they get makes me even better. I think I could now probably teach a class on pitching. But what I never expected was how pitching makes me a better writer.

Each of these “things I learn at conferences” comes at a cost – and in this case it’s dealing with the anxiety of your own pitch and the second-hand embarrassment of listening to bad pitches. The sheer number of writers who stand up and say stuff like, “My novel is about the challenges of motherhood and it’s domestic noir, like Gone Girl” [No! Gone Girl has nothing to do with motherhood, and you pitch a story, not the themes in it!] or “My protagonist is a nepo-baby who needs to grow and realize how privileged her life has been, and the novel begins when she’s kidnapped and held for ransom on an island, and she can’t fight the guys so she decides to work with them and then she discovers they’re actually part of a terrorist plot…” [No! That’s just random shit happening to a person, it’s not even a plot, never mind a pitch!]

In publishing, there’s a joke about the slush pile. When you ask, “What’s the story about?” The response is “It’s about 300 pages.”

When I pitched Driving by Starlight, my eventual agent asked, “What’s your story about?” I said, “It’s Gossip Girl, but set in Saudi Arabia.” She wanted it immediately.

It can take years to distill your story into the clarity of a single sentence. But I promise, it makes the book better. And if the writer hasn’t done that work, the story will meander.

2. That one trick that takes your craft to the next level

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Romance is the highest earning genre of fiction, generating $1.4 billion in annual revenue. Most romance readers are women. Most romance writers are women. By pooh-poohing the genre, not only was I missing out on opportunity, I was being a bad feminist. It still wasn’t my thing, but I started reading a few books, by recommendation only. I learned to appreciate a lot of things, like the world-building in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series. Even if the tall-dark-and-handsome tsundere (of course Japanese has a better word for the brooding Byronic hero) really wasn’t doing it for me, I learned narrative intimacy – how we describe characters is biased by who’s doing the describing.

The thing about the romance genre is that it is so constrained that it’s a miracle any book stands out. Beyond word count and other mechanics, there has to be a HEA (Happily Ever After) or a HFN (Happy For Now). In fact, after reading a few romance novels, almost all of them have exactly the following beats:

• We meet the protagonists separately and see the flaws that clearly put them in conflict

• Protagonists meet and sparks fly — first reaction is usually distaste.

• A catalytic event forces them together.

• Protagonists see worst of each other.

• Some crucible forces them to stay together, with a ticking clock.

• A chink in each other’s armor lets them see a shared vulnerability.

• Vulnerability met with tenderness leads to attraction.

• Attraction denied grows stronger.

• First one then the other gets an opportunity to break from crucible early and self-sabotages.

• Clock runs out. Time for separation comes. Surprise event (that has been building all along) forces independent reckoning.

• Each separately acknowledges feelings, but they treat it with their old ways — character flaws and coping mechanisms remain.

• Final breakthrough that shows each has dealt with their character flaw and learned. New approach yields better results.

• HEA.

So, what keeps you reading, if it’s so predictable? This is the real mystery. Just as I started reading romance to join my fellow women, I also decided to learn how to bake. Last week, I attempted my friend’s gluten-free frangipane recipe. I messed it up (twice). Even with a constrained recipe, a cake can either rise up and be perfection, or be a soggy, eggy mess. It has all the ingredients. But it doesn’t work.

The difference – whether with romance fiction or recipes – is measurement and timing. Too much of one ingredient, and it’s a mess. Too much time between one beat and the next, and it’s a mess.

I decided to read Heated Rivalry (before watching the show), and finished the book in 1.5 hours. Maybe less than that. The prose was ordinary (I’ve read better fanfic), but there’s a reason the book was so successful. Ordinary ingredients, but precise measurement and timing. Let’s take a look.

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Prologue: Beat butter into froth

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But nobody gets better alone. I had help, so much help. So in the interest of paying it forward, I’ll be using this post to share some of the editorial feedback I received, and how it changed the book as well as my writing.

First of all, what was the process like? I’d signed with Kate McKean after pitching to her at a Writers Digest conference, and sending her my full manuscript at her request. She said she’d get back to me with revisions in a few months. Maybe other writers believe that if an agent signs you, your book’s ready to go, but I never did. I was painfully aware that I was a debut novelist, and this was my first full-length novel. Then, one day, in the mail, I received this:

300 pages, hand-edited, line by line. The summary of what I needed to fix ran on to about 7 pages. She called to make sure I wasn’t crushed by the feedback. I wasn’t. I was ecstatic. You often can’t get this kind of feedback if you pay for it. She insisted I spend time internalizing the feedback before reacting or jumping to revisions. I thanked her profusely and got to work.

I’ve learned since that this is not how most people operate. Most writers (most people), especially novices, are a potent mix of arrogance and insecurity. They are certain their work is amazing, and better than most of the shit that’s getting recognized. They’re also horribly insecure that their work is awful, not up to their own standards, and destined for rejection. This mix of arrogance and insecurity can often make it difficult even to read feedback and understand it, never mind learn from it.

What was the difference in my case? I chalk it down to a few things:

• At my work, all ideas are developed collaboratively. We are always co-authors, co-editors and reviewers of each other’s work. This means letting go of the ego in service of what’s best for the project. I knew that my agent had my success and my novel’s success top of mind – after all, if it didn’t get published, she wouldn’t get paid. This meant I valued her as an equal partner – it wasn’t my novel, it was ours.

• Kate’s one of the most experienced agents in the industry. I trusted her judgement, but I could tell she trusted mine too. At no point was her feedback stifling my voice or style, only allowing it to shine brighter.

• I am not afraid of confrontation. Honestly, I kind of enjoy it. It drives me crazy when people either lie to your face that everything’s fine when they’re miserable, or when they gaslight you into thinking your writing’s good when it isn’t. Feedback is a gift – I can’t trust people who can’t be honest with me, or who put their comfort over our relationship.

• For the 3 months that she was editing the manuscript, I didn’t look at it. I did other things. I didn’t want to have to do the version merge if we were both editing at the same time. This meant I had some objectivity that allowed me to have fresh eyes on my own work.

All to say, I couldn’t wait to get started on the revisions. Beyond the paywall, I’ll share the original first 2 pages of Driving by Starlight, the advice I got on revisions, as well as the final published first pages.

Preview:

• Overspecification slows down a story and makes the reader feel hemmed in.

• Avoid giving your characters unique eye-colors; it’s become cliche in YA.

• We don’t know anyone well enough to know why this is bizarre.

• … and more

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Google gives a reasonably good definition of salience, but I will go so far as to say that without salience:

• I wouldn’t be able to hold down even a regular job, never mind a high-stakes one.

• I wouldn’t be able to finish a novel – reading it or writing it. I certainly couldn’t edit one.

• I’d probably be an alcoholic marinating in existential dread instead of a functional adult.

At work, I gave a talk to my colleagues on the importance of salience when communicating to people with power – going beyond BLUF (bottom-line-up-front) to focus on what’s important to your audience, and writing with clarity, directness, and conciseness. But that’s the output of a cognitive process that takes years to build. What’s the input? How do you build within yourself an intuition for what’s important?

Take the bullets above. Communicating with just 3 bullet points is a tactic you’ll hear in every corporate seminar. But how do you know what goes in the bullet points? That’s the real challenge, one that gets even harder in the age of AI and information overload. Think it was hard to focus with social media? That was with just humans vying for your attention. Now, your inbox is probably filled with emails like this, that are clearly written by robots:

If you’re a writer, the situation gets worse. How do you stand out in the slush pile, or grab the attention of an agent? With AI, publishers are backing away butthurt, and agents are sharing why they reject 90% of queries, and what keeps them reading. Quote from the linked article:

Writers, the bar is high. If I show up to an acquisitions meeting with a project I personally love - and which I think has a fantastic concept - and fumble the one-line pitch, or ramble, or somehow miss the point, the whole room’s impression will be the concept is overcomplicated and difficult to convey and therefore that it won’t sell.

It’s not because the whole room is brutal and corporate and doesn’t care - it’s because it is VERY hard to undo a first impression. You can learn from that as a writer.

Your query letter is your first impression. No - the first paragraph of your query letter is your first impression.

Never mind the query letter. Nearly every writer (including me) focuses on what’s important to them to convey, not what’s salient for the reader to know. Yes, they need to know what happens, but more than that, they need to know why what happens matters.

When writing fiction, the following needs to be there on page 1 (really page 0.5 because the chapter starts halfway down):

1. Who is the protagonist and why should the reader care about them

2. What the protagonist wants and why it’s imperative that they get it

3. What stands in the way of them getting it

Nothing I’ve said so far is new, and yet people ramble when they speak, send long emails that go unread, and write fiction that fails to spark to life. Some friends and I were talking about how candidates frequently get rejected in job interviews for being “unstructured in their thinking.” That’s another way of saying, They lack the ability to know what’s salient and communicate it succinctly. When I read Kesia’s Substack post about why agents reject queries, I sensed the same frustration.

The issue isn’t just about writing a great query letter that follows the template – if you can’t figure out what’s salient and what’s not, chances are your book is as rambly as your query letter, and your plot as convoluted as the alleys of Fes.

How do we fix it? I came upon this article recently about how, to declutter your house, you need to declutter your thinking first. These lines hit me hard:

“When we image the brains of chronically disorganized adults, we don’t see laziness. We see a very specific pattern—decision loop paralysis. The brain begins to process a task, becomes overwhelmed evaluating too many options at once, and shuts down. The person walks away. The mess stays. And crucially, the loop gets a little stronger each time.”

I’m not a disorganized adult, but boy do I know some. I’ve struggled to understand them, to empathize with them, to help them in a way that isn’t “fixing” their lives for them, and – to my knowledge – always failed. They want to get ahead at work, but can’t remember what happened in last week’s meeting or speak without rambling. They are full of knowledge, rattling off endless details, but lack insight and incisiveness. They can’t hold down a job or manage a budget, but they’re buying comforting indulgences they can’t afford. Their houses are full of clutter, their phone is always dying, or they’re clutching onto some new self-help book as a life-raft. And they’re struggling to write.

It’s so easy to fall into judgement, instead of recognizing that the lives we lead are not conducive to clarity and focus. Trauma disorganizes the brain, makes you distrust your decisions. Kids are a neutron bomb to any plan. Those with ADHD struggle to hold onto a thought long enough to execute on it (Why did I come into this room again? Why is this scene here?) And that’s not taking into account the constant assault on your attention from ads, games, social media and more.

So how do we break out of it? The answer in the linked article is CBT to retrain the brain, which isn’t simple or quick. It takes time and commitment to build focus, to increase attention-span, and to declutter your thoughts enough to let that flow into how you live your life.

It made me wonder when I started down this path, and how. Yes, I had a lot of privileges, including functional parents, but I also lived through a lot of chaos: two wars and three country moves before I was fifteen. And this was in the Before Days when you didn’t have phones and spreadsheets that helped you get organized.

Then I remembered the following passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (emphasis mine). Watson has just moved in with Holmes, and is trying to understand him by figuring out what he does and doesn’t know:

This, my friends, is a commitment to salience. What makes Holmes successful is not only his observational skills. Watson, too, observes, but does not know which of his observations make meaning. This is what Holmes provides, when he says, “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

If following the scarlet thread is what Holmes the character does, so too does the author. In German, Goethe uses the red thread (roter faden) to describe what connects the elements of a story:

The ropes in use in the royal navy, from the largest to the smallest, are so twisted that a red thread runs through them from end to end, which can not be extracted without undoing the whole; and by which the smallest pieces maybe be recognized as belonging to the crown. […] Just so is there drawn through Ottilie’s diary a thread of attachment and affection which connects it all together, and characterizes the whole.

Whether we’re writing an email or a novel, or trying to distill a massively complex issue into three bullet points, or creating space and time to write in the midst of a chaotic house / day, or revising our novel to be more focused, we need the skill to find and follow the red thread, and to hold onto it despite the other claims on our attention. We also need the intuition to recognize what is and isn’t important, especially at a time when generic AI writing is becoming indistinguishable from human prose.

So how do we build the skill? And why did I say, at the beginning of this post, that the soul craves salience more than survival?

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