Tuesday 21 November 2017

Scott Pack at The Writer's Summit: Crafting to Sell

On of the best talks at The Writer's Summit was by Scott Pack (@meandmybigmouth), the energetic and amusing associate editor of Unbound and editor-at-large of Eye Books and formerly head buyer for Waterstones. Any errors in content are mine alone!

He began by inviting us to imagine a grand entrance onto the stage for him with lights, fireworks and fanfares- which The Writer's Summit's budget couldn't run to. It was an entertaining riff and you could see the audience relax and engage. By a strange coincidence the end of the Writer's Summit was indeed serendipitously marked by fireworks bursting into the sky over Waterloo.

He began with a short history lesson. When the Net Book Agreement existed (a British fixed price book agreement between publishers and booksellers)- from 1900 until the mid 90's- bookshops flourished, as it was a level playing field. Most of the audience were old enough to remember Ottakar's, Dillon's, Borders, Books Etc gracing the high streets up and down the country. Now the NBA is no more, fewer bookshops exist for browsing and people often discover books online. You can read the first few pages of most books on Amazon for free.

And that is precisely why a killer opening is so important.

Here are his top ten tips:

1. Write a great first line. He gave us `The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.' This is from `The Go Between' by L.P Hartley (1953) Also `It was the day my grandmother exploded.' from Iain Banks' `Crow Road' (1992). To this I would add my own personal favourite `It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.' from Anthony Burgess' `Earthly Powers' (1980).

2. Make the reader care. Right from the first ten pages. Think of the emotions you want the reader to feel about the people you are writing about. If you give the reader an interesting character who is relatable or striking, then we do care.

3. Dialogue is your friend. It is not an info dump. Exposition and back story are your enemies. Think about the way different people speak and how to progress the plot through dialogue.

4. Introduce conflict. You need to lure the reader in, a trail of breadcrumbs to make them want to read on. He spoke of the importance of cliffhangers- certainly within the first 10% of the book, since a Kindle sample is precisely that. He spoke of a book called `Cliffhanger' which begins with an excellent premise. (Not the action adventure by Jacqueline Wilson.) A husband and wife have a terrible argument and she goes storming off into the night. He follows her out into the pouring rain and finally spots her figure standing near the edge of a cliff. In a moment of madness he pushes her off the cliff. He returns home, paralysed with remorse, only to find his wife warm and dry inside the house.

5. Start as late in the story as you can. This was a particularly interesting point and one I hadn't considered before. I think I may have missed the next few minutes as I immediately started considering this idea in relation to my own books.

6. Make something happen (while avoiding adverbs). He even mentioned doing adverb sit ups (to make you cut them out of your prose, whenever you come across one).

7. Steal from the best. Look at the first 10 pages of a book you love and see what they've done and how they've pulled the reader in. He suggested actually typing up these first ten pages as a way of physically learning how other writers work. And then deleting it all, of course.

9. Don't follow all the rules.

10. Be yourself. Getting published has a lot to do with luck and timing. It's all very subjective. A good book will find its audience.



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