A lot of you are new here. Hello.

You probably found me through a note about you’re and your, and whether people who care about the difference will soon be seen as fossils. Judging by the replies, I’m not the only one horrified. Good. You’re my people.

Here’s why it matters so much to me.

I write psychological thrillers, and in my line of work a single word can be the whole case. A narrator says “I” when she should say “we”. A husband explains something nobody asked about. A character uses the past tense for someone who’s supposedly only missing. Readers might not notice consciously, but they feel it. Something’s off, and they can’t say what. That’s what precision is for. Not to win arguments about apostrophes, but because the exact word is often where the truth leaks out.

My first novel, Before I Go to Sleep, is built on that. Christine wakes up every morning with no memory and has to decide, every day, whether to believe the man who says he’s her husband. All she has is what people tell her, and the precise words they use. It became a film with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth. Next year Christine comes back: the sequel, Before I Sleep Forever, is out on 6 May, and the original goes on stage in a UK and Ireland tour with Giovanna Fletcher and Tom Chambers.

So it’s a busy year ahead, and I want to bring people along for the ride.

What free subscribers get

Once a month or so, a letter like this one: what I’m working on, what’s coming out, what I’m reading, and the odd glimpse behind the scenes. That stays free, always.

What paid subscribers get

The other side of the curtain. Writers don’t usually show you this part because it isn’t flattering. Most of writing is wrong turns, cut scenes, characters who didn’t survive the edit, and decisions made at 2am that look obvious in hindsight and felt impossible at the time.

Here’s what’s coming for paid subscribers before Christmas:

• The read-through. I’m about to sit in a room and hear actors speak Christine’s words aloud for the first time. I’ll write about it straight after: what it’s like to watch your book become someone else’s.

• From the cutting-room floor. A scene from Before I Sleep Forever that didn’t make the final book, and why it had to go.

• Essays I won’t publish anywhere else. Like Kneel, which started out being about Fleabag and ended up somewhere I didn’t plan to go. The free half is HERE. The confession is behind the paywall.

• Unpublished work. Stories and fragments that never found a home, or aren’t ready for one yet.

The aim is two pieces a month, at least.

The offer

To mark the relaunch, paid subscriptions are 50% off until Thursday 6 November. After that the price goes back to normal and stays there.

Get 50% off forever

If you’re happy on the free list, I’m genuinely glad you’re here and you’ll keep hearing from me. But if you’ve ever finished a thriller and wondered how the author pulled it off, or what they threw away to get there, this is where I’ll show you.

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Until next time,

Hello!

I’m not going to pretend I’ve been particularly good at keeping in touch. In fact, it feels like it’s been years since I last sent out a proper newsletter. But I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing. Quite the opposite. There’s been rather a lot going on, (which is probably why I haven’t been writing newsletters) and I thought it was about time I told you about some of it.

I’m also planning to make these updates a regular monthly thing, give or take, along with some more personal, creative stuff for my paid subscribers.

So, here’s what’s been happening in my little corner of the writing world.

Christine is back!

The biggest news is that Before I Sleep Forever, the sequel to Before I Go to Sleep, is finally making its way into the world.

In fact, it’s already out in France! The French edition, Avant d’aller mourir, was published earlier this month, and the first reactions have been lovely. There’s something rather surreal about seeing a book you’ve spent so long working on suddenly become an actual object that people can buy, read and have opinions about. Especially when those opinions are no longer yours to influence.

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished the copy edits on the English-language edition, which will be published worldwide by Orenda Books on 6 May 2027.

I’m relieved, of course. It’s been a long journey back to Christine, and an even longer one getting her story to the point where I’m finally happy with it. But there’s some sadness, too. For years, I’ve been the only person who knows what happens to her next. Now that chapter of her life is gradually moving beyond my control.

Which is, I suppose, exactly what should happen when you publish a book.

PRE-ORDER HERE

Meanwhile, Christine is heading for the stage…

As if having a sequel coming out wasn’t exciting enough, Before I Go to Sleep is also being adapted for the theatre.

You might already have seen that Giovanna Fletcher will be playing Christine, and last week we announced that Tom Chambers will be joining her as Ben.

The production will tour the UK and Ireland next year, and tickets are already on sale.

I’m particularly excited because I’ll soon be attending the first read-through with the principal cast. There’s something extraordinary about the thought of sitting in a room listening to real people speak words written for characters who first existed only in my imagination.

I’ll tell you all about it afterwards. Or as much as I’m allowed to, anyway.

DATES AND TICKETS

And there’s more…

I’m also working on another novel, although I’m going to be a little mysterious about that one for now.

What I can tell you is that you can expect not one but TWO books from me next year.

Somehow I found myself busier than I’ve been in years. I’ve had more deadlines, more commitments and more plates spinning than I have in ages, but rather than bringing everything grinding to a halt, all this activity has forced me to get much more ruthless about how I spend my time.

And, strangely enough, I’m getting more done.

Who knew?

I’ll have more to tell you about the new book soon.

What I’m reading

At the moment I’m reading an advance copy of The Confessions, the next novel from Will Carver.

It’s quite different from his previous work, and I’m enjoying seeing him confidently breaking new ground. I’m not quite finished yet, so I’ll save my final verdict for another time. But so far, it’s a corker.

A little more from me

Finally, a quick word about this Substack.

Going forward, free subscribers will receive these monthly updates about my writing life: what I’m working on, what’s being published, what’s coming up, and the occasional recommendation or glimpse behind the scenes.

For paid subscribers, I’ll be sharing something a little different: more personal essays, memoir, short fiction, unpublished material, deleted scenes, and some of the strange things that end up on a novelist’s cutting-room floor.

I’m aiming for a couple of paid pieces each month, alongside these regular updates.

For a taste of the sort of thing I mean, you can read my recent piece, Kneel which started off being about Fleabag, but which morphed into something else. Something quite unexpected and a little bit confessional.

And since this is a sort of relaunch, I'm offering 50% off paid subscriptions for the next seven days. If you've been thinking about joining me, now would be a particularly good time.

And, before I go, a question.

Have you ever finished a novel and desperately wanted to know what happened to its characters afterwards? Which book would you most like to see a sequel to?

I’d love to know. Do leave a comment or reply to this email.

Until next month,

I rewatched the extraordinary Fleabag recently. You’ve seen it, right? I devoured the first series when it first came out, ten years ago, and even as I was watching it that first time I knew I’d be rewatching it sooner or later. The writing was just too good, and as so often happens I found I could either enjoy it or analyse it, but not both at the same time, so I opted for the former.

Anyway, this time round, the above scene — from the second series and which, significantly, takes place in a confessional — really got its claws into me. Even though it passed me by six or seven years ago. This time, though? I cried (though at the time I was coming off some medication which I hadn’t realised was putting a buffer between me and my emotions, so I was crying at anything).

The thing is, just lately (and it occurs to me now that this is quite possibly related to the drug withdrawal too) I’ve been feeling that I’ve also been getting life wrong.

Does anyone not feel like that, though? Do you feel you’re getting it right?

I’m not sure I even know what getting it right looks like. The algorithm does that, I suppose. On the one hand, it gives us exactly what Fleabag is looking for, perhaps what we’re all looking for. It tells us what to like and what not to like, and who to listen to and who not to listen to, and who’s cool and who’s not cool, and what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s exactly what Fleabag wants, but it doesn’t help. None of it helps.

We scroll. We see other people with their perfect lives and perfect bodies, with their perfect cappuccinos and their perfect abs and their perfect recipes for the perfect mid-week dinner, and their gym routines and macros. And although we know it’s fake — all of it, and especially now — we can’t help it, can we? We think that kind of life is attainable. If only we had more time, or more money, or more energy. If only we were as driven as that influencer, or that pop star, or that artist or that writer, then our life could look like that too. Surely?

That’s the dissonance right there. We know that kind of life is unattainable, and yet we berate ourselves and self-flagellate and call ourselves lazy when we don’t attain it. I know the people who are publishing 20-odd books a year aren’t writing them, or aren’t writing them in the same way that I write mine in any case. But still, without the buffer that the drug provided, I feel it. I attack myself for my low output, and I tell myself I ought to be doing better.

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There is a power in communal singing that is beautiful and terrifying and unexpected. We harmonise, we are synchronised. We come together and become bigger than the sum of our parts.

This hits me, every time. There are a variety of moments that nearly break me, but one in particular.

It happens every time. Midway through the song, when the basses, the tenors and the baritones (of which I am one) fall away. A lone voice — Kevin’s in this case — takes over. Just him and a piano. That’s it. No one breathes.

It builds. The refrain. If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward? Gradually, one by one, the other sections join. They’re just words, and a melody. Aren’t they?

If I’m so strong, why am I broken?

I get through it, because I have to. I get through it by thinking about the audience, most of whom don’t know the song and aren’t ready for it. Certainly aren’t expecting it. I get through it by concentrating on the notes, the pauses, the beats. I listen to the dynamics. Don’t start too big, you give yourself nowhere to go. Something to remember.

Count the beats, watch for Joe’s cues. Don’t fuck it up. That’s my job, for the thirty minutes or so that we’re on stage, anyway. Don’t fuck it up. Simple.

But no. No. That’s not it. It’s more than that. But what?

Connection, I guess. We send the song out, and the audience receives it, and when it works the song is bigger than us, and bigger than them. So big it’s unimaginable, in fact. Incomprehensible. It fills the auditorium. Not us. The song. We’re just the mouthpiece.

So that’s the job, really. To take these words and this melody and turn them into power, and light. That’s all. No big deal. Easy, right?

Just feel it, I tell myself. Deep enough that I can give it life and let it breathe and do its job. Not so deep that I can’t get through it.

I’m lucky I’m a baritone. We drop out before everyone else. Seven bars, give or take. Just as I’m about to lose it. I make it to the end because all I have to do is listen. Not even that. If I wanted to, I could think about the next song, or what I plan for dinner, or who I’d like to fuck.

I don’t, though. I listen. I do and I don’t care. And I’m not broken. Am I?

Maybe I am. There’s a moment, when it’s over. It’s happened every time we’ve performed it, and so I ought to be expecting it. It goes like this. Joe looks up — today he’s smiling, which means we’ve done a good job— and we relax, slightly, and exhale.

And then there’s silence. No applause, no cheers. Nothing. No one moves. The entire theatre is still.

We fucked it, I think. They don’t like it, they don’t like us. We killed the song, didn’t turn it into light but turned it into shit.

But then the the applause comes, and it is genuine and loud, and it is all the sweeter because of the breath, the nothing, that came before it. We are so empowered. We are not broken.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there, two men are walking through this capital city that is hosting us. They are not alone. There are thousands of us, from all over the world, and we have come to sing, and to unite in our power, and to connect, and since they are walking through the gay district, and they are empowered, we are empowered, and they love each other, they are holding hands.

A drink is thrown, by men who, when confronted, pretend not to speak English. Confrontation. Escalation. It becomes clear they were planning this. More men appear, a nose is broken and a night which is about love and joy and singing is suddenly about concussion and haematomas and getting to the hospital quickly.

Tomorrow, one of the men will perform, even though he can no longer breathe through his broken nose.

He sings. Songs of love, and hope, and resilience. Songs that are bigger than the sum of their parts. Bigger than all of us. Songs are power. And light.

Later, when it is over, the two of them will return to the same street, the same bar outside which they were attacked.

They will hold hands.

We are empowered. We are not broken.

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You can pre-order Before I Sleep Forever here…

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Then there’s the play. Before I Go to Sleep is going on stage. A UK and Ireland tour runs from January to June 2027, with Giovanna Fletcher in the lead. Seeing a story I wrote at a kitchen table get handed over to actors, a director, a set, an audience in the dark, is a peculiar feeling. I’ll write more about that process as it unfolds, because there’s a lot to say about what happens to a book when other people start making it theirs.

More information, including dates and tickets, here.

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Which brings me to the invitation.

These free posts will keep coming, and they’ll keep being the newsletter: where I am, what’s out, what’s next. But I’ve started doing something different for paid subscribers, and I think of it as the room behind the curtain. Process, cut scenes, the editorial decisions I usually keep to myself. Essays I won’t publish anywhere else, and unpublished work, the pieces that didn’t find a home or aren’t ready to. The honest version of how the books actually get made, including the bits that don’t survive.

If that’s of interest, you can upgrade below. Founding members get an acknowledgements credit in the next novel and a signed first edition when it lands.

Either way, I’m glad you’re here.

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A few years ago a friend sent me their manuscript. I’d agreed to read it partly out of friendship and partly — if I’m honest — out of curiosity, because this person could write. I knew that already. I’d read their earlier work, shorter pieces, and there was a quality to their sentences that I recognised and respected. A kind of precision that looked effortless and wasn’t.

So I sat down with it expecting to enjoy myself, and for the first twenty or thirty pages I did. The prose was doing everything you’d want prose to do. And then, somewhere around page forty, I became aware of a faint unease that I couldn’t immediately locate. I kept reading, hoping it would resolve. It didn’t. By page eighty I put it down and sat for a while trying to work out what had happened.

It wasn’t the writing. The writing was fine. Better than fine.

What I eventually identified — and it took me longer than it should have — was that I couldn’t work out which of the two stories running through the manuscript was the one I was supposed to be following. There were two threads, both rendered in the same careful prose, both populated with characters I was being asked to care about, and at no point did the novel make clear, either through structure or through weight or through the simple gravitational pull of consequence, which was the plot and which was the subplot. They just ran alongside each other, parallel, neither serving the other.

The prose couldn’t fix that. No sentence, however beautiful, could fix that. And this is the thing I find myself coming back to again and again when I’m reading manuscripts for clients: the writers who get rejected are very often not the writers who can’t write. They’re the writers who have put almost all of their creative energy into the level of the sentence, and not enough into the architecture that the sentences are supposed to be building.

Agents know this. It’s arguably the main thing they’re reading for, in those first few pages — not whether you can write, but whether you can construct. The prose tells them you’re serious. The structure tells them whether the book works.

Read on for the specific structural problems I see most often in otherwise well-written manuscripts — the ones that are invisible at the sentence level but obvious to an agent by page fifty, and what to do if you suspect your novel has them.

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I used to think — and I’m embarrassed to admit how long this lasted — that good writing sounded like good writing. That there was a register, a particular quality of sentence, that marked the thing as literary. I chased it. I read passages I admired and tried to work out what they were doing, technically, and then attempted to do the same thing myself. The result, for years, was prose that was self-consciously beautiful in the way that a person can be self-consciously beautiful. You notice the effort. The effort is the problem.

I don’t remember exactly when it shifted. I think it was somewhere in the middle of the novel I was writing before Before I Go to Sleep (one which was eventually abandoned). I read something back and realised I’d written a sentence I was quite pleased with, and then realised — in the same moment, almost — that I was pleased with it for the wrong reasons. It sounded like writing. It had the cadence and the imagery and the slight elevation of register that I’d taught myself to associate with literary fiction. And it was doing absolutely nothing for the story. It was, in fact, slowing it down. I cut it. Then I looked at the paragraph it had come from and cut two more.

The line I came back to, eventually, was something I’d heard years before and half-dismissed: if it sounds like writing, cut it out. I’d thought it was advice for thrillers, for genre fiction, for people who didn’t care about language. I understand now that it’s actually the hardest possible standard to meet. The best sentences are almost transparent. They deliver you somewhere without you having felt the journey. You look up and you’re in a different emotional place and you’re not entirely sure how you got there. The sentence that says look at me has already failed, because you’re looking at the sentence instead of through it.

This matters everywhere in a novel. But it matters most — and this is where I see it go wrong again and again, in the manuscripts I read and assess — in the synopsis.

The synopsis is where writers revert. I think it’s the pressure of it, the knowledge that this is a selling document, that it has to impress. And so the writing voice comes back, the one that sounds like writing, the one that announces its own literariness. Agents read it and something goes slightly wrong for them, even if they can’t immediately say what. The prose is fine. It might even be elegant. But it has the quality of someone performing their novel rather than transmitting it, and that gap — between performance and transmission — is exactly what an agent is trained to detect.

Read on for the five specific places this happens in synopses — the constructions that signal to an agent that you don’t yet fully understand your own story, and what to replace them with.

For 48 hours only: 40% off a paid subscription for life. I don't do this often — this is the first sale I've run in months and I won't be running another one any time soon. If you've been thinking about it, now is the time.

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Here’s something I’ve noticed after reading many, many synopses from writers who can genuinely write.

The prose isn’t the problem. The structure isn’t usually the problem either, not in the way most craft guides mean when they say structure. The problem is almost always the same thing wearing five different masks, and if you’ve drafted a synopsis and you know — in that specific, uncomfortable way — that it isn’t working, this is probably why.

I want to be direct about something before I go any further: most writing advice about synopses is addressed to the wrong problem. It tells you how to make your synopsis neater. Cleaner sentences. Better paragraph breaks. A tighter second act. None of that will fix what I’m describing here, because what I’m describing isn’t a presentation problem. It’s a diagnostic one.

The synopsis is a symptom, not the disease.

When a synopsis fails — and I mean fails in the specific way that produces a form rejection or radio silence after a partial — it’s almost never because the writer didn’t follow the right formula. It’s because the synopsis is faithfully reproducing a problem that already exists in the manuscript. The synopsis just makes it visible. Which is, if you can hold the discomfort of it, actually useful information.

Here are the five mistakes I see most often. The first one is free. The rest are for paid subscribers — not because I’m gatekeeping craft, but because what follows is the kind of diagnostic work I normally do in a manuscript assessment, and I want to give it the space it deserves.

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Mistake #1: You’re summarising events instead of dramatising consequences

This is the most common, and it produces a synopsis that reads like a very detailed plot outline. It lists what happens. It does not — and this is where the problem lives — show us what each event costs the protagonist, or what it forces them toward next.

A synopsis built on events reads like a shopping list. A synopsis built on consequences reads like a story under pressure. Agents are looking for the second one, because what they’re actually asking when they request a synopsis is: does this writer understand what their story is really about?

If your synopsis contains the word “then” more than twice, you are probably summarising events. Each beat of your synopsis should create an unavoidable therefore or but — the protagonist does X, therefore Y becomes inevitable, butthen Z happens. If you can replace your transitions with “and then” without any loss of logic, you have a list, not a story.

Read your synopsis with this in mind. Count the “thens.” That number is diagnostic.

The next four mistakes are the ones nobody talks about — because they require you to look at your manuscript, not just your synopsis.

Paid subscribers get the full diagnostic: mistakes 2 through 5, with specific questions to ask of your own synopsis, and the one rewrite move that fixes most of them.

If you’re in the querying process or close to it, this is the post to have open while you’re revising.

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The most common piece of advice given to writers with stalled novels is to push through. Write past the difficulty. Trust the process. The words will come.

Sometimes that’s right. Sometimes the difficulty is just resistance, and the answer is discipline.

But sometimes the difficulty is structural. The words won’t come because the premise has run out of story — and no amount of pushing through will generate plot that the idea was never built to produce.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve looked at how to score your premise and how to diagnose structural weakness in your draft. This week is the piece that makes both of those actionable: how to figure out what length your idea actually wants to be, before you commit another year of your life to the wrong one.

Further down, you’ll find the full length-matching guide — a practical framework for identifying whether your idea is a short story, novella, novel, or epic, with specific indicators for each. This is the piece I wish existed when I spent fourteen months on a manuscript that turned out to be a novella.

The Container Problem

We tend to think of length as something we decide — I’m writing a novel, so it will be 90,000 words. But length isn’t a decision so much as a consequence. It follows from the structural properties of the premise.

When you force a short story idea into novel length, you get padding. You get scenes that feel necessary but aren’t. You get subplots that don’t quite connect to the main artery. You get a middle that loses momentum because the premise never had enough story to sustain it.

When you compress a novel idea into short story length, you get something that feels rushed and under-explored — characters who don’t fully arrive, stakes that don’t have room to escalate, an ending that lands before the reader is ready for it.

The form isn’t a cage. It’s a fit. And matching idea to form is one of the most underrated skills in fiction.

Further down, I’ll also address the hardest part of this framework: what to do when you’ve already committed to the wrong length. Because the answer isn’t always “start over” — and knowing the difference matters.

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Last week I gave you a framework for scoring your premise across five dimensions — Escalation Range, Antagonist Leverage, Decision Irreversibility, Stake Naturalness, and Ending Resistance. If you haven’t run your premise through it yet, start there.

This week is for the writers who have their score and are staring at their draft trying to figure out where, exactly, the problem lives.

Abstract structural problems always show up as specific scene problems. The gap between “my premise scored low on antagonist leverage” and “I can see it in my manuscript” is where most writers get stuck — because it’s one thing to understand a concept and another to recognize it in your own work.

Further down, I’ll show you exactly what each weak dimension produces in your draft — the specific symptoms, the patterns readers notice, and the scenes where the damage tends to be worst.

The Translation Problem

Structural analysis is only useful if it changes what you do next. And most writers, even after a honest diagnosis, find themselves back at the same scene, making the same small adjustments, because they can’t see the connection between the abstract problem and the concrete page.

The five dimensions from last week aren’t just categories. They’re causes. Every recurring problem in a stalled manuscript — the saggy middle, the tension that won’t accumulate, the climax that lands wrong — traces back to one or more of them.

Once you know what to look for, you start seeing it everywhere. In your own work. In published novels. In books you’ve read and loved but found slightly unsatisfying without knowing why.

Further down, I’ll also walk you through how to strengthen each dimension without abandoning your premise — because for most writers, the right move isn’t to start over. It’s to rebuild the foundation under the house that’s already standing.

And next week, the final piece: a practical guide to matching your idea to its correct form — novel, novella, short story, or epic — before you’ve committed another year of your life to the wrong length.

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One of the biggest reasons novels stall around 40–60k words isn’t writer’s block. It isn’t lack of motivation. And it isn’t a discipline problem.

It’s your premise.

Not because your idea is bad. Your idea might be exciting, original, and full of genuine potential. But exciting and structurally sufficient are two different things — and most writing advice never teaches you to tell them apart.

A story idea can be all of the above and still not have enough load-bearing architecture to hold 90,000 words upright.

This is the conversation nobody wants to have, because it’s easier to blame the middle. To rewrite act two again. To add a subplot, cut a character, restructure the timeline. Writers will do almost anything before they’ll look at the foundation.

But the foundation is usually the problem.

Further down, I’ll give you a scoring framework to measure your premise’s structural depth — not just questions to ask, but an actual number that tells you whether your idea was built for the length you’re attempting.

But first, some questions…

The Premise Stress Test

Before you touch another scene, ask yourself these five questions honestly:

1. Can the conflict escalate multiple times without repeating itself? Not just get worse — escalate differently, through new complications rather than louder versions of the same one.

2. Does your antagonist have real, sustained power to interfere? Not just at the climax. Throughout.

3. Are there irreversible, high-cost decisions baked into your structure? Choices your protagonist can’t walk back, that close doors permanently and force the story forward.

4. Can the stakes keep rising naturally — or do you have to keep inventing new reasons for the reader to care?

5. Is the ending genuinely difficult to reach? Not just emotionally hard, but structurally resistant — the kind of ending that could only arrive after everything that came before it?

If you hesitated on more than two of those, you may not have a plotting problem. You may have a premise that was built for a different container.

Further down, you’ll find a full scoring system for each of these dimensions — with a number at the end that tells you exactly what you’re working with and what to do about it.

Some Ideas Aren’t Novels

This is the part that stings, but it’s also the most useful thing I can tell you: not every story idea wants to be a novel. Some concepts are perfectly shaped for a novella — lean, propulsive, complete at 40k words. Some are long short stories. Some are 120k-word epics with the structural bones to prove it.

Understanding which you’re working with isn’t a failure of imagination. It’s craft. It’s what separates writers who finish from writers who are perpetually rewriting their middles.

The stalled manuscript you’ve been blaming on discipline or motivation or the wrong outlining method? It might just be a novella that’s been asked to wear a novel’s clothes.

Next week I’m going to show you what each structural weakness actually looks like on the page — because once you have your score, you need to be able to see the problem in your own draft. That piece will change how you read your own work.

But first, here’s the scoring framework I talked about.

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Most writers revise by feel. This is the framework that replaces feeling with precision — and it’s the closest thing to reading your own manuscript the way an agent does.

You’ve probably already read the free version of this conversation. You know that agents aren’t rejecting your prose. You know their stress-testing structure. You know the difference between a manuscript that’s well written and one that’s structurally inevitable.

Now let’s talk about how to actually get there.

Because knowing the problem and being able to diagnose it in your own work are two completely different skills. What follows is the framework I use with every editing and coaching client — the same stress-test I run on manuscripts before submission, the same questions I use to find exactly where narrative control is quietly breaking down.

This is where the work actually happens.

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Most rejections have nothing to do with prose quality. Here’s what agents are actually looking for — and why your manuscript might be failing the test before they even finish the first chapter.

Let’s get something out of the way.

Your writing isn’t the problem.

You’ve workshopped it. You’ve revised it. Your beta readers loved it — they said it was beautiful, that the voice was stunning, that they couldn’t wait to see it published. And yet the rejections keep coming. Form letters. Silence. The occasional “not for me.”

Here’s the truth nobody in your writing group is saying out loud:

Agents aren’t reading your manuscript. They’re stress-testing it.

And the test isn’t about prose. It’s about structure.

What agents are actually scanning for

Literary agents aren’t line editors. They’re not sitting there admiring your sentences. They’re moving fast, and they’re asking — often subconsciously — a very specific set of questions:

Is the protagonist driving the story, or just reacting to it?

Do the stakes escalate in a way that feels personal and irreversible?

Does the midpoint fundamentally shift the power dynamic between your characters?

Is there clear causality between scenes — does each moment earn the next?

Does the climax resolve the character’s internal conflict, not just the external plot?

These aren’t line-editing questions. These are structural questions. Developmental questions. And if the answers aren’t embedded in the architecture of your manuscript, no amount of beautiful prose will save you.

Why “something felt off” is the most expensive feedback you’ll ever get

You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself about someone else’s work.

“I loved it, but something felt off.”

That feeling has a name. It’s called structural drift — and it’s the invisible force behind more rejections than any other single factor. It’s why a manuscript can sit in the “almost there” drawer for years. It’s why your concept is strong, your voice is distinctive, your chapters are individually compelling — and agents still pass.

Beta readers catch the symptom. They rarely diagnose the cause.

Precision revision is not the same as rewriting

This is where a lot of serious writers lose years of their career.

Revision doesn’t mean rewriting from scratch. It doesn’t mean scrapping your voice or gutting your plot. Precision revision means diagnosing exactly where the manuscript is quietly failing — where narrative momentum stalls, where character agency softens into passivity, where stakes plateau instead of escalate, where the thematic thread frays just enough to let readers disengage without knowing why.

This is the difference between a manuscript that’s well written and a manuscript that’s structurally inevitable.

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Structurally inevitable means the reader cannot imagine the story going any other way. Every scene earns the next. Every escalation feels personal. The ending lands not because it’s surprising, but because it was always, unavoidably, the only place the story could go.

That’s what agents are looking for. That’s what gets manuscripts off the slush pile.

Stop asking “Is this well written?” Start asking “Is this structurally inevitable?”

If you’re querying right now — or preparing to — this is the only question that matters.

Because agents aren’t rewarding beautiful writing. They’re rewarding narrative control. And narrative control is a craft skill that can be learned, diagnosed, and revised with precision.

Serious writers don’t revise blindly. They stress-test.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and start revising with surgical precision, I work with fiction writers at exactly this stage — through developmental editing, submission assessment packages, and one-on-one coaching designed to get your manuscript structurally ready for the agents who are the right fit for your work.

EXPLORE MY COACHING AND EDITING PACKAGES

Because almost there isn’t close enough. Let’s close the gap.

Was this useful? Share it with a writer who’s been querying longer than they should have to.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Yesterday I wrote about creative resistance.and how most advice flattens it into two useless categories: push through or rest. The response was interesting. A lot of people said some version of “Yes, but how do I actually know which one applies to me?” Fair question.

Most of us are terrible at diagnosing our own resistance. We confuse fear with exhaustion. We call plateaus collapse. We treat temporary dips as permanent decline. And then we wonder why our interventions don’t work.

This piece is for paying subscribers because it goes deeper than yesterday’s overview. It gives you the actual diagnostic framework I use with clients - the three layers of resistance, how to distinguish between them, and what to do at each level. This isn’t theory. It’s the pattern recognition that separates people who stay stuck from people who move forward.

If you’re serious about getting unstuck, this is where precision matters.

Creative advice tends to flatten everything into two categories and two responses: Push through. Or rest.

Serious creatives know it’s not that simple. The difficulty isn’t just deciding what to do. It’s interpreting what’s happening correctly.

You’d think it’d be easy, right? You’re stuck, you’re dragging your feet, you can’t make yourself sit down and do the work. Obviously you’re either burned out (in which case, rest) or you’re being lazy (in which case, push through). Simple diagnosis, simple solution.

Except it’s not. Because burnout and avoidance are only the surface layer. Underneath them is something more precise — and more interesting. And if you don’t get the diagnosis right, you’ll apply the wrong treatment. You’ll rest when you should be moving. You’ll push when you should be backing off. And the spiral tightens.

Let’s go deeper.

The Three Layers of Creative Resistance

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I was thirty-five the first time I convinced myself I was burned out.

This was back when I should have known better (I’d been writing for over a decade by then, had published some things, had even made a bit of money from it), but apparently age and experience don’t inoculate you against self-deception. I’d wake up each morning with what I told myself were good intentions, sit at my desk with my notebook or laptop, and then... nothing. Just a kind of heavy blankness that settled over me like fog. So I’d close the laptop. Make tea. Reorganize my bookshelf. Research submission guidelines for magazines I’d never actually submit to. Plan elaborate revision schedules for the novel I hadn’t written yet.

And I’d tell myself: I’m burned out. I need rest. I need to recharge.

(Looking back, what I actually needed was honesty, but that would take another few years to figure out.)

The thing about burnout — real burnout, the kind that actually earns the name — is that it doesn’t play favorites. It’s not selective. When you’re genuinely depleted, everything becomes effortful. Not just the work you’re avoiding, but all of it. Sleep goes sideways. Your mood flattens out into something gray and unresponsive. Things you normally enjoy — that TV show you were loving, that walk you always take, even just talking to people — all of it starts to feel like wading through something thick and resistant. You don’t want relief from the work. You want relief from being awake.

But that wasn’t what was happening to me at thirty-five, though I didn’t know it then (or maybe I did know it, somewhere under all the elaborate justifications, but knowing and admitting are very different things). Because the truth was, I had plenty of energy. Just not for the thing that scared me.

I could scroll through writing advice on blogs for hours. I could read about other people’s creative processes, watch interviews with successful authors, reorganize my research notes into increasingly baroque filing systems. I could plan new projects with astonishing clarity and enthusiasm — just ask me about the three novels I outlined in exquisite detail during that period, none of which I ever actually wrote. I could do anything, in fact, except the one thing that mattered: open the document and face what was actually there.

And the moment I did try — on those rare occasions when guilt or some fleeting burst of resolve got me to actually put my fingers on the keys — something would tighten in my chest. My thoughts would scatter. That heavy exhaustion would roll in like a wave, sudden and seemingly irrefutable. See? I’d think. Burned out. Told you.

But that wasn’t depletion. That was fear.

(It’s taken me a long time to understand the difference, and even now I sometimes catch myself confusing them, because they’re such good mimics of each other, such convincing impersonators.)

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, slowly and painfully and mostly through making every possible mistake first: serious creatives — and by serious I don’t mean successful or published or even good, I mean people who actually care about the work, who’ve fused their sense of self to their ability to make things — we’re particularly bad at distinguishing between these two states. Because when you’ve built your identity around output, around being someone who creates, any drop in momentum doesn’t feel like a normal plateau or a temporary stall. It feels like evidence. Proof that you’ve lost it, that you never had it, that the whole thing was a delusion.

The brain hates uncertainty. Give it a choice between “I’m experiencing some resistance” and “I’ve fundamentally burned out and everything is collapsing,” and it will pick the dramatic story every single time. Because at least the dramatic story has certainty. At least it explains things.

And that catastrophic interpretation — that’s what creates the spiral. Not the stall itself.

I remember, during that period at thirty-five, having a conversation with a friend (another writer, equally stuck, equally convinced of their own creative demise) in which we talked earnestly about taking a break, about how important it was to rest, to refill the well, to not push ourselves. And there was something so seductive about that narrative. So comforting. Because if we were burned out, then the fact that we weren’t writing wasn’t a failure of courage or honesty. It was just biology. Depletion. Something that required gentle, extended recovery.

But here’s the question I wish someone had asked me then, the one that would have saved me probably a year of spiraling: If the fear of failing disappeared — if you woke up tomorrow and somehow knew, with absolute certainty, that whatever you wrote would be good enough — would you still be this exhausted?

And if I’m honest (which, again, I wasn’t then, but let’s pretend), the answer would have been no. Or at least: I’m not sure. Which is the same as no, really, just with more elaborate defenses around it.

Because what I was protecting wasn’t my energy or my nervous system or my creative reserves. What I was protecting was my ego. My sense of myself as someone with potential. The comfortable fiction that I might be good, as long as I never actually tested it.

Avoidance is very good at disguising itself as self-care. It borrows all the language of burnout — rest, recovery, gentle boundaries, listening to your body — and deploys it in service of staying safe. And burnout, for its part, often gets mistaken for laziness or weakness or lack of discipline, especially by the person experiencing it, because we’re so thoroughly soaked in narratives about pushing through and showing up and doing the work.

Neither of these mistakes is harmless.

When you call avoidance “burnout,” you prescribe rest for what is actually a fear response. You give yourself permission to stay away from the thing that scares you, and you call it healing. And when you call burnout “avoidance,” you push through genuine depletion, you override every signal your body is sending, you make things worse in the name of productivity or discipline or refusing to be weak.

The skill — and it is a skill, one I’m still learning — is diagnostic literacy. The ability to tell the difference. To sit with the discomfort of not knowing and then, slowly, carefully, figure out what’s actually happening underneath.

And here’s the thing: if you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in it (and if that recognition feels uncomfortable, sharp, a little too accurate), you’re not alone. Most serious creatives I know — the ones doing real work, not just performing creativity on social media — have experienced this confusion. Have convinced themselves they were burned out when they were actually just scared. Or pushed through what they called “resistance” when they were actually depleted and making everything worse.

The pattern repeats because we never learned to tell the difference. We were taught about discipline and showing up and pushing through, but nobody taught us diagnostic literacy. Nobody taught us how to look at our own stalled momentum and ask: what’s actually happening here? What am I protecting? What do I actually need?

So I built something to help with exactly that question. Not because I have it all figured out (I don’t, and anyone who claims they do is lying), but because after years of making these mistakes myself and then working with other creatives who were making the same ones, I started to see the patterns. Started to understand what questions actually cut through the bullshit and get to what’s real.

The Creative Disconnection Diagnostic isn’t motivational. It’s not going to tell you you’re amazing and you just need to believe in yourself (you probably already know that, and it hasn’t helped). What it does is help you distinguish burnout from avoidance, recognize your particular patterns of self-sabotage, identify what’s actually happening beneath the stall, and decide your next clean move.

Not the move that sounds good. Not the move that fits the narrative you’ve been telling yourself. The move that’s actually true to what’s happening.

You can take it here:

FREE DIAGNOSTIC TOOL

And if you want this kind of clarity applied directly to your work — not just in theory but in practice, with someone who’s been in the weeds themselves and knows what bullshit looks like because they’ve deployed most of it personally — I work one-to-one with serious creatives who want precision instead of reassurance.

Details are here:

COACHING

You’re not fragile. You’re not broken. But you might be misinterpreting what’s happening. And that’s fixable.

The question is whether you’re ready to look.

There is a moment in every novel when something subtle breaks.

Not the structure. Not the sentences. Not the logic of the plot. Everything still works, technically. The pages function. The scenes do what they’re meant to do. And yet the work no longer pulls you toward it.

This is not the moment most people talk about.

We talk endlessly about starting novels. About openings. About momentum. About discipline. We rarely talk about what happens next — the long, neutral stretch where nothing is obviously wrong, and the work becomes quietly unbearable.

Most novels aren’t abandoned in a crisis. They’re abandoned in that neutral space. The writer doesn’t decide to stop. They simply drift. They restart the opening. They re-outline. They research. They tell themselves they’ll come back when they have clarity.

What they lose isn’t discipline. It’s contact.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a short text about that moment — not as advice, not as a method, but as an attempt to name what’s actually happening when the work stops rewarding you for being there.

It isn’t a guide to finishing a novel. It won’t make the work easier or faster. It doesn’t offer routines, systems, or motivation. What it does is describe the psychological middle of novel-writing, the respectable ways writers leave without admitting it, and what it can mean to stay in contact with the work without force or fantasy.

I’ve put it up quietly as a 32-page PDF called When the Work Stops Rewarding You.

It’s for writers who start novels seriously, lose contact partway through, and want to stay long enough to make an honest choice — rather than disappear without noticing they’ve gone.

If that moment is familiar, you can find it here:

TAKE A LOOK

If it isn’t, you don’t need it.

That’s as it should be.

Between Christmas and New Year there’s a strange pocket of time I’ve always liked. A sort of limbo, when the noise drops and the city seems to empty. The future hasn’t quite started. You can hear yourself think again.

This year has changed how I work. Not in dramatic ways, but in quieter, more deliberate ones. I’ve become more interested in depth than reach. In work that lasts longer than a scroll. In writing that doesn’t rush to explain itself.

That’s what this space has gradually become.

Some of you read everything I publish. Some of you dip in when something catches you. Some of you have been here quietly for a long time. I don’t take any of that lightly.

As next year approaches, I’m continuing to put more of my attention into the slower, more reflective work, the pieces that don’t always fit the public feed, but feel right to make anyway. The paid side of this newsletter exists simply to make that possible.

There’s no obligation to support it. The free work will continue, and I’m glad you’re here however you read.

But if this writing has mattered to you — if it’s been something you’ve returned to, or sat with, or recognised yourself in — becoming a paid subscriber is one way of standing a little closer to it.

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However you choose to read, thank you for being part of this year. The next one starts soon

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This is Time To Come Back.

It’s for creatives who might still be working — still producing, still showing up, still creating — but who sense they’ve drifted from the quiet centre that once made the work feel aligned.

Nothing is broken. You haven’t failed. But something essential has slipped slightly out of reach.

Time To Come Back isn’t about doing more, or starting again. It’s about returning to the still point beneath the noise, where the work feels aligned, honest, and yours.

If you’ve been busy but not quite there, this is for you. Today, let’s talk about quiet.

There’s a particular kind of silence that isn’t rest and isn’t quitting. It’s more a noticing, a realisation that you’ve drifted.

Maybe nothing dramatic happened, you didn’t make a decision or get lost. You just… kept going slightly off-centre.

Most systems interpret that drift as failure. They measure output, consistency, visibility. They don’t know how to register misalignment, and treat is as having value.

Time To Come Back does.

Because drifting doesn’t mean you don’t care. It usually means you care enough to notice when the work no longer feels aligned — even if you don’t yet know how to correct it.

It doesn’t erase what you’ve already done or invalidate the version of you who showed up. And it doesn’t mean you’ve lost access to what made the work true.

There is no streak to break. No rhythm you ruined. No earlier version of you who did this “properly” and left you behind.

There is only the next small act of realignment.

Not a reset. Not a dramatic pivot. Just a coming back — toward what feels aligned again.

It can take many forms. Maybe it looks like reading this and stopping. Maybe it’s opening the notebook without producing anything. Maybe it’s admitting, quietly, that the work wants something different now.

If you’ve gone quiet — or kept going while feeling slightly untrue — this still counts.

You don’t need to apologise, either to yourself or anyone else. And you’re not too late.

When you come back, do it in a way that keeps you aligned. That’s the rhythm here.

Time To Come Back isn’t this Substack.

It’s a separate, quiet space — a weekly ritual sent by email.

No challenges. No productivity pressure. No obligation to keep up.

Just a small, regular invitation to return to the still point of your creative practice — and to stay aligned with it.

If you’d like to receive that ritual, you can sign up here.

Time to Come Back

There’s no pressure to do anything with it.
Come back when you’re ready.

If you’re curious, click here to download a free pdf, A Quiet Beginning. It’s a taste of what TTCB is about.

A Quiet Beginning

I finished Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying this week.

It’s often described as a classic crime novel, but that label is misleading. Structurally, it hardly behaves like a crime novel at all, at least not a contemporary one..

There’s no central investigation driving the narrative. No gradual unveiling of a hidden culprit. Instead, the book makes an early, decisive structural choice. It shows us who is responsible, and then asks a different question altogether.

Not who did it? Or even why? Instead, how long can this continue?

That shift changes everything. Suspense comes from watching characters move closer to the truth without quite touching it. From seeing how social assumptions, politeness, and credibility act as shields.

As a reader, you’re not solving alongside a detective. You’re watching a system fail — slowly, plausibly, and with unnerving calm.

All of this made me wonder whether A Kiss Before Dying would be published now. That’s not nostalgia talking. It’s a genuine question about appetite and risk.

Have we become less tolerant of crime novels that don’t follow the rules? Or has the industry?

That’s the question I’m left with this week:

What crime novel broke the expected structure — and made you uneasy because of it?

Not a clever twist. A book that refused the rules.

Reply here — I’ll gather a few responses for Sunday’s micro-essay.

What’s Been Holding My Attention

Book

Kristin Hersh, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt
Fragmentary, broken. A reminder that life’s narrative is usually anything but straightforward.

Listening

Geese - Getting Killed (2025)

A line I highlighted

“The job of the novelist is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem correctly.”
— Chekhov

From the Desk

This week, for paid subscribers:
• a Craft Lab examining the opening line of The Blind Assassin — how one sentence establishes time, consequence, and unease

Free for the diary. Paid for the blood.

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This is the first in an occasional series I’m calling Craft Lab.

These aren’t essays and they’re not lessons. They’re close looks at short passages that quietly do difficult work — the kind that shape a reader’s emotional response before the reader realises anything has happened.

This one is short. Save it. Skim it. Come back to it when you’re thinking about beginnings.

Today, let’s consider the opening line of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood:

One sentence, and Atwood gives us time, character, event, tone, and mystery.

No adjectives. No flourish. No explanation. Just inevitability.

What matters isn’t what the sentence tells us. It’s what it refuses to do.

1. Starting After Something Huge

Atwood doesn’t begin at the catastrophe. She begins after something so large it has already rearranged the emotional landscape — a moment that has split life into a before and an after.

“Ten days after the war ended…”

The war isn’t the story’s inciting incident. Laura’s death is. But the war functions as a kind of pressure — a shorthand for upheaval and loss. By placing the sentence after its conclusion, Atwood signals that the ground is already unstable. Whatever follows will happen in a world that has been fundamentally altered.

Then comes the real inciting incident:

“…my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

The sentence tells us two things at once. Something vast has just ended. Something intimate has just begun. The scale collapses from global to personal in one short line. Atwood merely hints at the impact the war had on Laura, without explaining it. The reader is invited to speculate.

Notice how the sentence simply places two facts side by side and lets the silence between them do the work.

That’s where the unease comes from.

2. The Polite Horror of the Verb

“…my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

“Drove” is a disturbingly calm verb.

Not plunged. Not hurled. Not leapt.

Drove. It’s ordinary. Atwood refuses melodrama. She makes the horror polite — and that politeness is what chills. The sentence behaves as if this is a fact that can be filed away, not a wound.

Remember, verbs that under-express emotion create space for the reader’s imagination to rush in and do the emotional labour themselves.

3. Musicality

Read the sentence aloud. Hear how it lands on the final word: bridge. A hard plosive, then nothing.

Your eye stops. Your mind accelerates.

4. The Tense, and the Hidden Voice

“… my sister Laura drove”

This is retrospect. Someone is telling this later.

Without foregrounding a narrator, Atwood introduces a witness — someone who lived on long enough to speak.

That matters more than the event itself. We get the sense it’s not Laura’s story we’re about to hear.

Or not only hers, at least.

Openings don’t just start stories. They imply why the story is being told now. We lean in not only to see what happens — but to understand why the narrator is telling us this now.

5. Craft Lab Takeaways

• Short opening sentences create intimacy. Fewer words mean higher voltage.

• Emotion doesn’t need adjectives.

• Beginnings set psychological tone, not just plot direction.

• Aftermath is often more powerful than impact.

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What novel’s first line changed how you thought about beginnings — and why did it linger?

Share it in the Notes thread. I’ll restack a few that deserve another look.

Each Craft Lab ends with a single constraint and one focused exercise — a way of translating the analysis into practice without overworking it.

This week’s constraint is designed to rewire how you think about openings.

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