Tom Bromley is an author, editor, bestselling ghostwriter, and the creator of Reedsy's acclaimed course, How to Write a Novel. He's opening his office doors for one afternoon, where you can find out anything you want about developing your craft skills, editing your manuscript, and preparing to get your novel published.
How do I write an opening chapter that hooks my readers?
That is a good question. I always think it's answering the question, why now? Why are we dropping the reader in at this particular moment? I think for me, that is key. If the book is too slow and it takes three chapters for the beginning to kind of take off properly, you're going to lose the reader before they get there.
By the end of that opening chapter, you should be sufficiently rounded that you've got a sense of the protagonist. You've got a sense of the story, perhaps a sense of the setting, and also in an important but quiet way, perhaps a sense of the voice. When I talk to publishers and agents and I ask what they look for, they always tell me that voice is the thing that they're particularly looking out for.
So if you get a sense of that in the opening pages, I think that's really, really important. And the other thing I would add as well, just think about the demands of your genre. So, for example, there's a familiar trope in crime fiction. If you're writing a crime novel, you need your body by the end of chapter one.
Think about the demands of the particular genre you're writing in as well, but I think for me, that crucial question of "why now?" is the starting point that will hopefully get you going, and get the story up and running as quickly as possible.
Do you start a novel with an outline? And if so, what kind of outline do you recommend?
We sometimes talk about this debate between whether you're a planner or a pantser, and by pantser I mean that you're sort of flying by the seat of your pants, you're not doing any kind of prep at all. And most people are not one of those extremes, but sort of somewhere along that sliding scale.
It's about working out where on that scale you feel comfortable writing. Sometimes you want to have stuff planned, so then you've got that security there. Sometimes you don't want the planning because you want that freedom to explore. I tend to have quite loose outlines, so I've got a sort of idea of the overall kind of story arc. I know where it's going to end, so I sort of know the direction of travel, but I don't quite know how it's going to get there. I want to keep that little wiggle room to explore and see where the story could go, because I find that exciting when I write. If I know everything that's going to happen, I think you write in a slightly different way.
But I know other writers who will write enormously detailed outlines. You know, plots and structures before they start. So my sort of unhelpful answer is: it's different for everybody. Work out how much planning you need to do for yourself.
The other thing I would add is that some of the key work to do in advance is actually more thinking about the characters, and the protagonist in particular. I would focus possibly a little bit more on character, and a little bit less on plot, than you might be expecting, and that will help stand you in good stead.
What do you find is the key to developing compelling dynamic characters and not just protagonists?
For the central characters, I think one of the key things is motivation. What do they want? What do they need? Think about that sort of journey of change that they're going to go on. How are they going to be a different person at the end of the book to how they are at the beginning? Sometimes we talk about fat and thin characters, by which I mean, rounded characters and then characters who are kind of small and come in scene by scene.
If you're writing minor characters, having something distinctive that kind of grabs the reader and makes them immediately recognizable, is really, really useful. But generally, it's finding some spark or tension within them. So quite often when we talk about plot, we talk about dramatic tension.
I think the same is true with characters. You want a couple of attributes to that character that kind of rub up against each other the wrong way, and that creates a little spark and a little bit of tension. And when you get that, that's usually when those characters come alive.
When you're planning and developing characters, it's not about doing those character checklists with all that detail about where they went to school and what shoe size they are, but small little incidental details, and that's the way you can build up a picture of the character extremely effectively.
Can you talk a little bit about point of view and what the current trends are in various genres?
At the moment in publishing, the majority of the books are in either two kinds of viewpoints; either they're written in first person, or they're written in third person. Or they're written in what's described as third person close. Third person close is where you're following the action from the viewpoint of one particular character, almost like a parrot on their shoulder. So you're with that character and seeing their world, but you're not in their voice.
I think the use of first person has grown over the last 10-15 years. That's come particularly through the growth of YA and psychological thrillers as kind of new genres, both of which demand or tend to have first person narratives as their driving force. I don't know whether that will stay or whether this will be a fad, and in 20 years' time it will have shifted again.
There are two things I always say with viewpoint when people worry about which viewpoint to tell their story from. Firstly, what are the demands of the story? Which is the best way to tell that particular story? And secondly, what do you feel comfortable writing in as a writer? There's no point thinking I must write in first person if you're a third person kind of person. I often suggest to writers towards the start of the writing journey to try and write a section in one viewpoint, and then rewrite it in a different viewpoint, and see which one works better for that story.
That's really the key. What is the story you're trying to tell, and which viewpoint is the best way to tell that story, rather than thinking I'm going to do something clever by writing this book in second person, I'd say.
The other thing I would mention very briefly about point of view is the importance of consistency. So whatever viewpoint you choose, stick to those rules rigidly, otherwise you trip the reader up.
How would you decide whether to classify a book as YA versus adult?
When you're writing, you just need to write the book that you want to write, rather than thinking about where it's going to end up in the marketplace. When you do that, it tends to inhibit you a little bit and restricts you as a writer.
The first thing I always say is "give yourself the freedom to write the book first," and then worry about this kind of thing later on. If you're going down the traditional route and approaching an agent, an agent would be able to help and advise you here, rather than you feeling like you have to make this kind of decision by yourself.
And that would generally be a decision either for the agent or the publisher. My suspicion, and generally my understanding, is that if you're writing books either for teenagers, young adults, or an early 20s audience, people tend to read up by a couple of years.
So if you're writing a book and the protagonists are fifteen, then that's probably going to be read by people a little bit younger. If you're reading about someone who’s seventeen, then the readers are going to be predominantly a little bit younger again. So I would say, if you've got a book that's set in high school, that's going to be read by a younger audience primarily, unless it's done in a more kind of adult way, in which case it's not going to be aimed at readers in their early twenties in particular, but a wider audience.
The nub of it, I would say, is to not worry about it when you're writing. Don't worry about genre at this point. Write the book that you want to write and worry about where it will sit in the bookshop later on.
How do you improve pacing?
When you're writing, a lot of the pacing you're doing is in the rewriting, actually. I think when you go back through and redraft, that's when you can read it. Read the manuscript in full and see which bits feel fast and which bits feel slow.
And over the book, you want that pace to change. You don't want it to be the same pace throughout. That's the first thing to say on it. If you want to speed things up, use shorter chapters, and think about shortening sentences, and shortening paragraphs – these things will all add some kind of impetus to the narrative.
Use of dialogue definitely helps as well. So as a general rule, I would say that description tends to slow a narrative down and dialogue speeds it up. So if you're wanting to speed a book up, think about increasing the amount of dialogue. On the writing course, we do a week on what we call texture. We look at mixing up the balance between these different kinds of writing elements.
How do you make dialogue sound more natural?
The biggest piece of advice I always give to everyone about dialogue is: read it out loud. I think that's the quickest and easiest way to see whether the dialogue feels real or not.
If you're reading it and it sounds like a mouthful, then that's probably a bit too wordy and not how people normally speak. And don't be afraid to write in incomplete sentences. You know, if you listen, if you did a transcript of how I'm talking right now, it would be kind of all over the shop and not grammatically correct, but that's how people talk.
So don't feel like you have to follow grammatical rules when you're writing dialogue. But definitely reading it out, I would say, is really, really useful and a helpful technique to get into.
All else being equal, would you rather a story is set in a fictional land or a real place?
I'd rather have a place where the world is well written and well described. I think both can work equally well. Sometimes when you're writing real places, there’s that frisson, particularly if you know the place and there's like an authenticity there.
Sometimes in a fictional world, you have that freedom to kind of create something new and there's an excitement there. So actually, it depends on the writing, and it really depends on the book. If you're writing science fiction, or you're writing fantasy, then you're going to be writing about a fictional place. You don't have a choice. If you're writing a crime novel, perhaps you might want to set it in a fictional town rather than a real town. And there are advantages and disadvantages to both of them.
I remember interviewing one author who was really careful. He was setting the book in his hometown and he didn't want to annoy the local restaurants by being rude about them. So he gave himself some space by inventing places within the town that he could be rude about, rather than directly choosing places that existed. I would focus more on the quality of the description, but either could work extremely well.
How do you rein in the world of a book to limit scope and avoid kitchen sinking?
If you're creating a fantasy world, you've got more work to do. If you're setting up a novel in contemporary London, it's quite easy to set the scene, because you don't have to do that sort of increased world. I think the challenge with it is, not to add too much craziness in there.
The first thing I’d say is, you can have an amazing, fantastic world with a few things happening, rather than too many things happening. The other thing to think about is how you get that information across to the reader. If your world is too different and too complicated, then you're going to slow the story down because you're going to have to give the reader all this exposition and description and understanding of what the place is.
So actually, the key thing is in the telling and how you get that information across. When you're writing description, use sentences that the reader can relate to. I think that's a really useful and interesting way to kind of get the reader in and help them understand.
What’s your opinion on prologues and epilogues?
I'm prologue neutral, I think. I know there are some writers who absolutely believe that you should never have a prologue and should go straight into chapter one. For me, it depends on the demands of the particular story. I think the danger with prologues is that you end up having two chapter ones.
If there's too much plotty stuff happening in the prologue, if it's too long, then you get the chapter one again, and that sort of slows the story down. So if you have a prologue it should be almost like an hors d'oeuvre. It should give you a taste or a flavor of what is to come.
I would keep them short. I wouldn't worry too much about them at the beginning. I would probably write the book properly first, and then once you've got a draft there, read it as a whole, and then you can see whether the novel would benefit from having a prologue or not.
J. Sansom, who died quite recently, one of his books has just been turned into a TV series. I think it was the first of his crime mystery series set in monastery. For the first book he had this back and forth with his group of writer friends about whether he should have a prologue or not. I think in the end he wanted it, and then it was taken out, and he was persuaded to add it in, and then it was taken out, and then when they did the TV series, they've added it back in again. So it shows you there's no one right answer to this. Different people have different opinions.
And epilogues, I think by that point, once the book has resolved, you've got space to have a little bit extra going on. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but these are extra details to think about later on, rather than something you've got to get right, right at the beginning before you start the book proper.
How do you go about finding your unique voice?
I think sometimes that phrase ‘finding your voice’ is a little bit misleading. It's more about bringing it out. On the course we do a session and we look at some readings by Raymond Carver, who is brilliant on this. And it's about capturing a mixture of things. It's a sort of worldview. It's the way that you write sense of humor, opinions – lots of little things together that combine.
There's a wonderful essay by Raymond Carver called ‘On Writing’ in a book called Fires, where he talks about this brilliantly.
It's about giving yourself the space to breathe. It's not like a search where you find something to tack on top of what it is you're doing. It tends to be a thinning out, in the way that someone who sculpts is kind of carving the sculpture out of the rock. It's more that kind of process of bringing it out and having the confidence to do it, I would say, and it doesn't need to be flashy or showy at all.
There's a phrase by Raymond Carr from this essay where he says something about "a writer that has a unique way of looking at the world is one who's going to go far," and I think that's absolutely right. If you're writing about the ordinary in the everyday, but you're doing it in a different and interesting way, then you're doing well, I would say.
How do you balance everyday life and your writing?
I think you have to carve out the time to write, and I think one of the challenges in writing is that it tends to be the thing that goes because of the demands that come in.
So absolutely ring fencing that time. On the writing course, we have an author's panel and I asked them about when they wrote. It was interesting, the number of writers who get up early in the morning before the house is up and the day begins, to make sure they have this time. I think one started at seven, and one started at six, and one got up at five.
It was all, you know, everyone's getting up earlier and earlier, but they have that kind of time to themselves. I think finding that space and ring fencing is crucial. When you're working on a book, particularly when you're heading towards a deadline, it is all consuming.
And, you know, my family knows that I'm going to be up early and up late working through. The balance goes out at that time and then you have to kind of reset the balance afterwards. I would love to be one of those writers who just wrote a thousand words a day and, you know, so many months later, I popped a book.
Do you have any tips for combating writer's block?
The main thing is not to put too much pressure on you. I know sometimes when I've had people on courses and they've got stuck, and then they worry that they're going to get behind with the word count. And when you give yourself a hard time, you're making it even harder for yourself.
I tend to find that if the writing's not happening, it's not working, and I'll go and do something different. I might go and read, I might do some editing. Something fairly straightforward like going for a walk can really help as well.
There's something about being sat in front of a screen with a blank page and not being sure where to start. It's all quite static. If you get up and go for a walk, that quite often is where the ideas will come and will generate. So I would try and change things up a little bit.
I tend to find with writing that over the course of the book, I'll try to write in different places. Sometimes I'll start in my office and then I'll find, actually, I'm working better on the kitchen table for a bit, or I'll use different music or something to keep it different and changing.
But you will have periods where it feels like getting blood out of a stone to write, and other periods when the taps are open. When the taps are open and the words are coming out, get as much down as you can at that particular point. And as I said, I think you have some writers who will write the same word count every day, but for the rest of us it's a bit more up and down.
Don't be too hard on yourself in those moments. "All things must pass," as George Harrison once sang. So I would remember that too. It's a good reminder on the days when the writing isn't coming. We all have them, and any writer who says they don't is lying.
How do you find an editor and when exactly do you do it in the writing process?
There are different kinds of editors depending on where you are in your writing journey. So I think earlier on, the kind of editor you're probably looking for is someone who might be an editing coach, or who might mentor you.
The first point to think about getting an editor is when you've got a full draft. And I know that we've got some students who finished the course who will get an editor to have a manuscript reading assessment, and then do the rewrites on the back of that.
The other kind of editor is when they're going to get stuck into the manuscripts and copy edit and structurally edit the book. And that's for further down the line. But I think for me, you don't need to spend money on editing straight away. And certainly if you're submitting to an agent or a publisher, they would rather see the work that you can do, rather than have it professionally edited before you submit.
If you're thinking about self-publishing, then you would be looking at getting an editor to copy edit and work on the script. But I always advise people that the key thing really is to get readers. So if you've got a community of writers, whether it's on a course or elsewhere, get the feedback from your beta readers, pull those comments and do the rewrites on the back of that.
That will give you a lot of stuff that you need that a professional editor would give you anyway, so you don't need to spend that money necessarily. But for those moments when you do want comments and feedback and editors, I would obviously endorse Reedsy as a place where there are a lot of fantastic editors to be found.
Do you edit as you go, or write a complete draft and then edit?
I always say to the students that my advice is ‘never go back’. Once you start, you need to get through to the end.
Unless there's something where the plot changes so fundamentally that there's no point continuing, I would push on and get that full first draft down. If you find that you are rewriting and rewriting and rewriting that first draft, then you lose all momentum. Those are the people I found who never actually finish the draft in the first place.
And once you've got a whole draft, you can actually see the bigger picture stuff in a way that you can't on a chapter plan or whatever. My advice would very much be to go through, get to the end, then go back and do the rewrites in a bigger picture way, and then do the editing second.
Give yourself the space and the freedom to write in the first instance and come back and make changes later on is my advice. I think that's true for most writers. I know there are some writers who will go back and tweak as they go, but I would personally encourage you to resist that urge and keep writing.
What advice do you have for approaching the revision stage?
The first thing I always say when you're wanting to go back and edit is to give yourself the space. So I would put the manuscript in a drawer for at least a month or six weeks, and then read it afresh. I think when you do that, then you're going to have a little more space and distance to be able to see it more clearly.
One writer I worked with always prints their manuscripts out in a different font to the one they wrote in, because they think when they do that, they can see things in a slightly different way.
I think seeing it in a different way is really, really useful. I would read it as a reader first. So read the whole script, think about the bigger picture stuff first, think about the plot and the characters. Are they working? Think about the pacing, you know, which bits feel fast, which bits feel slow. Get the furniture in the right place first, and then get down to the smaller details after that.
But I think that first bit is key, to give yourself that space. To come back and don't be afraid to make big changes.
I've been working on a novel recently and I've written two drafts of it, and then I realized that, actually, what I'd written was the middle third of a longer book. And actually that 90,000 words needed to come down into about 30,000 words and have a sort of different beginning and ending. So that was quite a big shift and a big change, but don't be afraid to change things. It can make a big difference.
When do you find a beta reader? Is the first draft good enough?
Again, it's a little different for different people. My starting point with beta readers is other writers, so in the feedbacking on the course, we pair people up with different writers each week. There's something about writing and getting read by someone who's at the same point in the process that is really useful.
It helps them to understand, or be more sympathetic, I think, to where you're at as a writer. But generally fellow writers are always good starting points, or people who are really good readers. I tend to avoid good friends or family, because either they're sort of over nice because they don't want to offend you, or they're kind of really harsh, and that's a bit unhelpful. So finding someone whose opinion you trust I think is really useful.
Is a first draft good enough to get a beta reader? It depends on the first draft and it depends when it's useful for you to get feedback. I would rather complete a draft first and then get it into a shape where I feel comfortable showing it to people. So with this current book I'm working on, I think when I finished the first draft, I did do a bit of minor editing on it, but then gave it to half a dozen people to read and got feedback.
And then that fed into how I wrote the second draft. But I didn't show it to anybody. In fact, I'm quite private in that way. I didn't discuss what the book was about at all with anyone until I'd completed the draft. Some people like to have feedback as they go along. Finding either a course where you can find fellow writers or finding a writers group either online or offline is a really useful way of finding beta readers.
Every time I go back and read my draft, I find tons of little nits to pick, but I also find major changes I can make to improve the story. How do I know when I should stop?
There was a quote where he said that you knew a story was pretty much ready when you'd gone through and taken all the commas out and you went back and started putting them back in again.
There's never a kind of end point. Really, I think you just have to let go of your baby out into the world at some point. For me, I tend to find that you know when you feel you've done as much as you can on a script and this is as good as you can do at that particular moment.
And then it's getting feedback from people. Certainly, when I've worked on scripts, showing them to my editor and my agent has helped. They will tell you ‘that's pretty much good to go,’ or ‘this is going to need another kind of serious go through before going further.’
Get it to a point where you feel that this is as good as you can do, and then get feedback from other people to see whether they feel ‘this is okay and just needs a little bit of minor tweaking’ or if it needs something more fundamental, but you could go back and rewrite forever.
I think you can go back to books I've had published. If I reread my first book, I would quite easily go back and think, okay, well there's much more I could do here. But at that point of time as a writer, that was the best I could do. So that was a good point to leave it.
How do you avoid/survive the literary agent slush pile?
The slush pile is a challenge. If you're trying to get an editor or an agent, you're going to be one of many. The first thing I would say is you need to develop a thick skin about it because you are going to get rejections. And I think with the first book that I wrote I've still got all the letters. I think I've got about 25 or 26 rejection letters I had before somebody took it on.
So I wouldn't worry about that. But I think you need to remember that as a writer or as an agent, I would say they're looking at the book from a business perspective. So they are thinking, you know, can I sell this? So if they're rejecting the book, it's nothing personal about you as a writer or about you in terms of the quality of your writing.
It's more thinking, can they sell this? So you need to treat it in a sort of dispassionate business way, as they're treating it. I think it's quite hard to avoid, but the way around it is to make contact. So whether you're going to writer's conferences, getting one to ones with different agents and kind of making links there, following agents on social media –– trying to find some kind of connection there definitely helps.
When I started I did an MA in creative writing, which is the UK equivalent of an MFA, and the agents came to the course. So that’s how I got the agent, he was one of the agents who came to the course, but if your book is good enough, it will make it through.
I do believe that the system generally works, but a good covering letter, a good synopsis, and a good first page are all absolutely crucial. Everything does get read. I do know that having worked at Literary Agents myself, that everything will be looked at, but, making sure you've got your best foot forward, I think is definitely helpful.
How much editing should be done to the final draft before reaching out to an agent or sending a query letter?
When you're sending it out to an agent, you've got one shot. So you want the book to be as good as it's possible to be or as good as you feel you can do it because they are not going to say ‘I quite like it, but can you give it another go and send it back again?’ If they've rejected it once, they're sort of not interested. So get it to a good position.
As I said earlier, I don't think you need to get it professionally edited. I don't think that's crucial. But make sure it's ready. I think one of the things that I know that agents don't like is when you send off a couple of chapters and that's all you've written and they say, ‘Oh, that's great. Can you send me the whole thing?’ And then you go, well, actually I haven't written it. You know, I'm going to. And then you come back sort of two years later when you've written the book, by which point they've forgotten about you, or they've already signed another author who's a bit like you, or they're doing something else completely.
So if you're querying, you need to have that manuscript ready to go. I wouldn't be thinking about sending off stuff until you've got a whole script written. I know it's tempting to fire it off and see what happens, but I would wait until you've got a script there. And as I say, I don't think you need to get it professionally edited. But certainly I would have it beta read and that kind of level of stuff before you go out and send it to agents.
Do you have any tips for avoiding spoilers in a blurb?
My first job in publishing many years ago, I was a blurb writer. I worked for Little Brown and I wrote all the blurbs on the back of the books. It was a lovely job. You used to go in, in the morning and you'd write, you'd read the new manuscript by, you know, Patricia Cornwell, whoever it was at the time. And then you would kind of summarize the book.
I think that the key thing really is, readers hate stuff being given away in a blurb. So you're usually writing not about the whole story, but probably around the first third, possibly the first half, but kind of no further, and leave that sort of dot, dot, dot to leave things hanging.
But try and keep it more around what is happening towards the start of the book would be my recommendation, and try not to put too much in. I think one of the secrets with blurbs is they don't need to be long. The rule when I was doing paperbacks was that they had to be 100 to 150 words maximum, which actually doesn't give you much space to talk about plots.
If you can, set up the premise of the story, give a sense of where it is, give a sense of the characters, give a sense of what the book is like, who might like it, who are the similar writers. I think that's more than enough to kind of keep people going.
And actually, just on a similar point, sometimes that’s the case with the synopsis too. Because agents are readers and they want to read the book, so don't feel you have to give away the whole plot in a synopsis.
I know some agents absolutely hate that if they're reading a murder mystery and they read the synopsis and they find out who the killer is. They would much rather read the book and experience the book as a reader themselves. So if you're writing a synopsis, bear that in mind too, that you don't have to put everything down in the synopsis, in the covering letter.
How can we pitch a high word count book as a new novelist? Is it better to split the book to make it shorter and more marketable and try for a series?
I think it's changed. It's changed a little bit over the years, and the other thing I would say is it probably depends on which genre you're writing in. So, for example, if you're writing a fantasy series, actually quite often those books are quite long and that's kind of expected.
I do know that there are some agents who won't look at manuscripts over 120,000 words in length. They have a kind of maximum that they will look at. The thing to remember with long books is the cost of printing them. So once books are over a certain length, then they're really expensive to publish.
So unless it's exceptionally good, then it's a harder sell to a publisher. And in a similar way, if a book's too short, then it doesn't really work financially either, which is one of the reasons why books tend to fall in this middle way. That's changed in the last 10-15 years with the rise of eBooks, where obviously the page length doesn't matter at all.
Then you can do books of any kind of length you want. I think it depends on the story. I think it's hard to be too prescriptive without knowing the story. I think if you're writing a fantasy series, then there is scope for the books to be long if the writing is good.
Editors and publishers like series because if you've got a repeat book, and repeat business, that can work really well. I would say most debut novels tend to come in between 80,000-100,000 words. So if it's going to be significantly higher than that, just be aware of that fact as you're writing it.
How many agents do you apply to before you scrap a novel and write a different one?
I think I probably wrote to 25 or so agents. I remember the writer Tibor Fischer, whose first novel, Under the Frog, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I think from memory, he wrote to 49 agents who rejected it, and then the 50th took him on, and then it was published, and then he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. So you don't know, is the short answer. I think it partly depends how much stamina you've got. My normal advice for sending stuff out is send it to agents in batches, so maybe half a dozen at a time.
If you're getting the same feedback again and again, that might be a sign that this is the right time to pause it and try something else. But there's lots of stories of writers who tried and tried.
John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces has a kind of amazing story where he couldn't get it published at all. After his death, his mother took the book on (he died young) and it took her a decade to find a publisher for the book. And then the book was published and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
So you never completely know, but my sense would be, if you're getting the same advice, or the same kind of rejections from agents again and again and again, that would probably be the time to pause and work on something new. But give it a good shot. And as I said, there are lots of writers who've gone through loads and loads of agents before they find the one that worked for them.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
