There’s a lot of writing advice in the world – much of it free, but some you pay for, sometimes eye-watering sums.
Chances are, you don’t need it.
Mostly the advice is self-evident, too general to be of use (“Create 3D characters”… as if you were considering coming up with some 2D ones). And even if you find that kind of advice useful at first, there comes a time – probably sooner than you anticipate – when you are beyond it and on your own, with your particular work in progress.
Still, it niggles, doesn’t it – that there’s something crucial we’re missing, and everyone else is in the know. The sheer volume of ‘How to’ can be intimidating and overwhelming. Certainly it gets my students in a whirl (“But shouldn’t we – ?”, “Aren’t we supposed to – ?”). It can be the same for me: I’m fifteen books down the line but, if I don’t watch myself, I too can be off down those rabbit holes (what’s ‘psychic distance’? how do I ‘save the cat’?…)
There are plenty of writers offering you their services as editors and coaches.
I don’t undertake manuscript appraisals, nor offer coaching. My interest is in looking in depth at your writing: for clarity, coherence, fluency, and authenticity. What will make your writing resonate with a reader is the quality of your observations and your expression of them. It’s not, for example, about bunging in another plot twist. Ask yourself: what can you bring to the story that you want to tell, that no one else can bring?
It’s about depth, and heart.
So, why am I the person for you to come to, to work on this?
In a word: experience.
I have thirty years’ experience as a fiction writer and as a tutor and mentor. I’ve published thirteen novels and two collections of short fiction. My fiction is broadly literary, both contemporary-set and historical, and I’ve been fortunate to have enjoyed both literary and commercial success. I know all too well, though, how fiction writing is a matter of confidence, and how it feels to be stuck in the middle of a novel-in-progress. Along the way, I have learned so much from my agent and editors, and at least as much from the emerging writers with whom I have worked. Over the decades, I’ve tutored and mentored for all manner of organisations – for example, the Arvon Foundation – and for the five years 2000-2005 I was Programme Director of the MA in Novel Writing at Manchester University. For the past seven or eight years I have been working for Curtis Brown Creative, tutoring several of their three-month online novel writing courses each year.
It saddens me, though, that writers are increasingly feeling that they need to spend money to improve their chances of finding an agent and publisher. I couldn’t have afforded any of that when I was starting out. (Well, I still wouldn’t be able to.) So, it’s important to me to be able to keep costs here as low as I can. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be roped into a number of sessions, and anyway that shouldn’t be necessary: I should be able to help you within one session and in any case it’s you who should be the judge of that. My aim is to get you and up and running: to give you the confidence to trust your own judgement. If after one session you really do feel that you need another, we could discuss it, but I insist on drawing the line at three. After that, you’re on your own, because you have to be. It’s your novel, not mine.
How it works
If you are considering consulting me, please first contact me to check my availability. The next step is for me to check that we make a good match: I’ll ask you to tell me a little about what you’re writing, and to send me a sample of c500 words. If I decide against us working together, that’s likely to be down to my lack of experience in the genre or style in which you are writing. Or it might be that I genuinely don’t see how you need help and I’d rather you saved your money.
If we decide to go ahead, you would then send me up to 10k words of your work, plus a few hundred words to put it in context. I will make notes on the text and/or in the margin, and we’ll arrange to meet online (or phone, if you prefer) to talk about your work. My sessions always take longer than an hour, usually around two. Afterwards, I’ll send the marked-up copy back to you.
My fee for this is £295; and if I have worked with you before (perhaps at Curtis Brown Creative or at the Oxford University Summer School or on an Arvon course), then I’ll already know something of your writing and you’re welcome to a 15% discount.
As an alternative, I offer a brief consultation, for which I read up to 2.5k words of your work (plus a couple of paragraphs to put it in context) before we meet online – or by phone – for around 40 minutes. We can explore your strengths and qualities as a writer, the potential of the project that you are working on or hoping to begin, your aspirations and plans for it, and any concerns that you or I might have. The aim is that you leave the session with more confidence in progressing with your project.
My fee for this is £90.
Would you like to speak to me on email? You can email me here.