Jericho Writers

Here are the latest newsletters from Jericho Writers:

Using dialogue to show, not tell I really struggle with dialogue. Sometimes, my characters can chat away naturally like they really are sitting in a room together. And sometimes I will cringe as I’m writing it. When done properly, dialogue can be the ultimate tool to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, and add realism to your writing. In this newsletter, we find out how to do it properly.

CONVERSATION: Slushpile Live with Davinia Andrew-Lynch (Members only) 11 June 2019. Join agent Davinia Andrew-Lynch as she reads members’ work LIVE in this webinar. Davinia is actively trying to build her list of children’s and commercial adult fiction, so don’t miss out! FIND OUT MORE

JOIN US

NEW on Jericho Writers

MASTERCLASS: Advanced Dialogue Mini-Course Part 2 (FREE for members) Filmed live at the Festival of Writing 2018, the second part of James Law’s engaging mini-course looks into how we can show backstory through dialogue rather than relying on ‘telling’. WATCH NOW

BLOG: 5 reasons you might fear writing, by Peg Cheng Peg Cheng reveals the 5 things that were stopping her from putting pen to paper, and reveals how you can conquer your own fears and keep writing, too. READ NOW

SNAPSHOT: How to write a striking voice (FREE for members) What is ‘voice’? And how can you find a good one for your novel, whether you are writing in first or third person? I share my tips in this latest Snapshot. WATCH NOW

Content corner: Why ‘said’ is perfectly fine I remember a specific lesson at school that focused on all the different words you could use in your creative writing instead of ‘said’. This was a great way of learning about language, and how one word can change an entire sentence. Unfortunately, it also meant that my dialogue read a bit like this for the next decade: “What are you talking about?” Sam hissed. “You know,” Mary shouted. “I don’t,” Sam whispered. “Don’t play dumb with me,” Mary retorted. There’s a whole lot wrong with this example, but focusing on those verbs – they get tiresome pretty quickly, don’t they? In fact, I’d suggest completely ignoring that school lesson and writing entirely in ‘said’s, bar perhaps a couple of ‘whispers’ here and there if needed. What lessons do you remember from school that you’ve now chosen to ignore as an adult writer? Share them in the Townhouse, here! Sarah J

Cartoon

Follow us on Instagram for more of our 'The Life of a Writer' cartoon series by our very talented Stephanie!

As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact Stephanie on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice. Best wishes, Sarah Juckes Author | Jericho Writers *or if you're in the US, give us a call toll free on 1-800 454 2134

Plus – don’t miss The Festival of Writing 6-8 September 2019. The highlight of the writing year is back and bigger than ever. Join us for a weekend of workshops, one-to-ones, keynotes and all-round writing fun. The Ultimate Novel Writing Course Enrolling now for 17 Sept 2019. Start with a glimmer of an idea, and finish the year with a saleable draft in this king of writing courses. It’s Ultimate for a reason. Children’s Manuscript Review (Discounts available for members) An in-depth constructive editorial report on your children’s manuscript. Our editors will read, digest and absorb your work, then they’ll tell you how to improve it. It’s as simple as that.

JOIN US

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

The secret of style

Voice. It’s the secret sauce of writing. The magical herb that transforms your stew. It’s the leaf of gold in a martini. The lemony brightness. It’s also, no surprise, the single thing that agents most often look for in a debut work. A distinctive voice. The key to success. Although agents are most vocal in wanting this, I’d say that the same issue matters almost as much to self-published debuts. After all, if you’re writing just another romance, the reader can buy any old romance to meet their needs. They don’t have to buy your #2 in the series. But if you write something so distinctive that there’s just no adequate substitute out there, they have to buy your #2, and then your #3, and then … No prizes for guessing which kind of self-pub author makes more money. Right, so voice is good. But what is it? What actually are we talking about here? Well, the dictionary definition would be something like Voice = the author’s stylistic fingerprint. A distinctive way of writing, unique to that specific author. Voice is most obviously applicable to questions of prose style. So Raymond Chandler’s voice is immediately distinctive from the way he puts words on a page. This kind of thing: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Or this: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” But voice has to do with more than just prose. So if you think about (for example) I Am Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, there’s nothing so very remarkable about the way she puts words on a page. For example, this: “Then I understood I would never marry him. It's funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one's past, or one's clothes, but then--a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.” That doesn’t have anything like the showiness of Raymond Chandler. Each sentence is perfectly simple. The finish is rather flat, as though the author is painting in acrylics, not oils. That sounds like a put-down. But the human / emotional insights are so precisely observed, so accurately and simply delivered, that their cumulative effect is overwhelming. The flatness of style is, in fact, closely married to the insight. The same kind of insight delivered in Chandler-ese would have deflected most of the attention to the writing, and removed the power of the actual observation. It’s not hard to find voice in any author of real quality. Take Lee Child. He hardly operates at the literary end of the spectrum. You could slap a chunk of his prose down on the page and not find anything so remarkable. For example: “Never forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty” That doesn’t look like authorial voice even a little bit. That looks like a chain of sentences lining up for the World Cliché Parade. But – Jack Reacher. That’s the secret of Lee Child’s voice right there. The way Reacher thinks, acts, remembers, operates is a brilliant construct. Reacher certainly doesn’t have any of Elizabeth’s Strunk’s quietly piercing observations, but Child gives us a complete, brilliant, detailed picture of the way a fighting machine like Reacher works. The (mostly) unremarkable prose is absolutely a part of that. Reacher doesn’t do fancy, so the prose follows suit. And, OK, all this is interesting. But we haven’t yet said anything useful. I mean, if voice is so important, then it would be kind of useful to know where to get it, how to build it. And – I don’t know. Not really. Or rather: I don’t think there’s a specific set of techniques you can use to go and get yourself a distinctive voice. In that sense, it’s not like problems with prose, or problems with plot, where you can simply run a fairly standard set of diagnostic tools to identify the specific issues and find solutions. On the other hand, I can tell you what kind of person you have to be to have voice. What kind of writer. Above all, you have to be a confident one. Confident in yourself. I love quoting Gore Vidal on this. He says: "Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” The hardest bit there is the not giving a damn. It’s finding the mode of expression that works best for you, then just going for it. Taking off that inner handbrake. Following the logic of your path to its end. Ensuring, relentlessly, that you are satisfied with every last word on the page. That those words, in that order, spoken by those characters are what you want to express. That means, in order to please an agent – you have to not give a damn about what an agent may think. In order to please your eventual reader – you have to not care, or not care directly, about their judgements. In effect, the finding-a-voice journey is an act of inner completion, that just happens to be executed via writing. Which is great. Which is uplifting. But which is also a real bummer, because what tools and techniques do you use to become a more complete human? I don’t really have a useful answer to that question. I’d say my voice was kinda present in my first ever novel – it didn’t read exactly like anybody else’s debut novel. But before I had anything like a completely confident voice, I’d written five (maybe six) novels and three or four works of non-fiction. And yes, I think there’s something replicable about that technique. Write five or six published novels, and you’ll find yourself writing in a Vidal-ish, not-giving-a-damn kind of way. But some of you might be a little more impatient than that. And yes, as a voice-acquisition technique, I’d say my own process was hardly speedy. So instead let me recommend these two approaches:

1. Learn writing technique One of the reasons why newbie writers end up sounding undistinctive is that they have so much else to grapple with. Is my plot working? Should I choose first person or third? Does this character feel vivid? Does this relationship have enough conflict? (etc, etc, etc). The result is that they never really get to grapple with those Gore Vidal-ish things at all. Their minds (my mind, during those first few books of mine) are too pre-occupied with issues of mere technique. So, lesson one, absorb writing technique until it’s second nature. The more you absorb and internalise those tools, the more your mind is freed for other things. For self-expression and self-finding. 2. Rewrite You can’t be satisfied because something is OK. You can only afford to be satisfied when this is OK and expresses exactly what you wanted to say in the way that you wanted to say it. And because you don’t even know what you want to say until you start saying it, you’ll find, almost inevitably, that you build your way towards something good by writing and unpicking, and then re-writing and re-unpicking, all the way until you’re finally done. That’s lesson two. 3. Ignore anyone else’s model The next thriller writer to be as successful as Lee Child will not write like Lee Child. The next crime writer to make as much of a mark as Raymond Chandler will definitely not write like Raymond Chandler (because zillions of people have written in a Chandler-lite kind of way and absolutely none of them made any kind of mark.) So forget about those models, great as they are. Forget also about the endless peer-to-peer workshopping, practised by a lot of university creative writing programmes. That workshopping has plenty to be said for it, no doubt, but too much of it will turn your work into something that sounds like all those other creative writing MFA type products. And you don’t want that. You want to sound like you.

That’s lesson three, and here endeth all the lessons. That’s it from me. I am now going to take a hayfever pill and declare war on every blade of grass in Oxfordshire. Sneezily, Harry

PS: This week, I’m going to put the whole text of this email up on Jericho Townhouse. You can find the email here. I’ll be happy to deal with comments and questions in the thread beneath. If you have an enquiry that’s a bit more personal / private - then this is an email and I am a human. You know what to do next. PPS: The best place to learn writing technique? Duh. That would be on Jericho Writers, of course. Among your options: The Ultimate Novel Writing Course. Does exactly what it says on the tin. I think this writing course might be the finest writing course in the whole world ever. That’s certainly the way we designed it. More here. Mentoring, with the mighty Daren King. We’re looking to add more mentors to this programme soon, but Daren has been doing this for ten years and he’s very, very good. More here. Jericho Writers Membership. Don’t forget that membership confers access to a really complete, detailed, joyous video course on writing. If you just watched all those videos over the course of a month, you would definitely be a better writer than you were at the start. If you have a manuscript on the go at the moment, that course will show you countless ways to improve it. More on the course here. More on membership here.

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

What makes a good book cover? Whether you’re traditionally or self-publishing, book covers are a big deal. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but readers certainly do. A cover might tell them the genre, story and vibe – and even whether or not they want to buy it. In this newsletter, see look at Jericho’s top tips on cover design (and what to avoid at all costs!)

Not enjoying these newsletters? We’ll be sad to see you go, but we understand if your inbox is feeling a bit full. Click below to update your preferences if you’d rather not see these again. Otherwise, read on for a round-up of some top tips from us! UNSUBSCRIBE AT ANY TIME, HERE

JOIN US

Spotlight

MASTERCLASS: How to create covers that sell (FREE) There’s no question that a strong cover is essential to success on Amazon. David Gaughran talks about how to go about getting the right cover for your book in this self-publishing masterclass. WATCH NOW

BLOG: How to commission a cover for your eBook Commissioning a cover design is not easy and can easily become expensive. Here are 17 tips on how to find the right designer, for the right price, and ensure you end up with the right kind of cover. READ NOW

ORION UNCUT: Cover design (FREE for members) We chat to the Creative Director at Orion to find out how covers go from concept, to finished book – and who is involved in this process. WATCH NOW

Content corner: The best and worst covers of all time What makes a good book cover is entirely subjective. Personally, I like simple illustrative designs with bold text (and a touch of the macabre). But this is entirely because the books I like the most share these attributes. A good cover for someone who likes crime would be a moody image, with fat text and an intriguing title. For romance, it might be a rather attractive person wearing very little clothing. For literary... well. It could be something as simple as this. But this is from a reader’s perspective. From an author’s perspective, we want a book cover that will convey the genre by looking similar to other titles. We want the title to be readable when it is a thumbnail. We want it to fit with the other books in our series. Basically, we want it to make readers buy it. A bad book cover will do none of these things. It might also look like these. So, what are your favourite book covers of all time? And what covers have turned you off? Share them in the Townhouse here – I'm looking forward to reading these! Sarah J

Cartoon

Follow us on Instagram for more of our 'The Life of a Writer' cartoon series by our very talented Stephanie!

As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact Stephanie on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice. Best wishes, Sarah Juckes Author | Jericho Writers *or if you're in the US, give us a call toll free on 1-800 454 2134

Plus – don’t miss Jericho / Greene & Heaton Bursary for Under-represented writers DEADLINE TODAY. If you’re an under-represented writer with a draft of a manuscript, you could win a place on the next Self-Edit Your Novel tutored course, plus a special meeting with literary agents. The Ultimate Novel Writing Course 17 Sept 2019. Combining the best Jericho Writers has to offer, this course offers everything you need to take an idea to publication. Includes a weekend ticket to the Festival of Writing and a full Manuscript Assessment. Manuscript Assessment (Discounts available for members) Get detailed, structural editorial feedback on your work including advice on how to address any problems raised. Plus, you’ll be able to ask your editor follow-up questions about your report.

JOIN US

.

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

What makes a good agent? Finding an agent can weirdly feel a bit like dating. Finding the perfect person for your book can take some soul-searching, match-making and a good first-impression. In this newsletter, we delve behind-the-scenes of the author/agent relationship and ask: what should you be looking for?

New: Townhouse community (FREE for everyone) The new Townhouse is officially open! Create your free account and find your people. Includes lively forums, critique groups and even the opportunity to start a blog and create a following. START EXPLORING

JOIN US

Spotlight

MASTERCLASS: Literary agents in conversation (FREE for members) Our own Harry Bingham sits down with literary agent Caroline Wood to find out more about how agents work with authors, and how you can prepare the ultimate submission. WATCH NOW

BLOG: When an agent/author relationship goes bad What do you do if your relationship with your agent stops working for you? Lesley McDowell shares her real experiences and top tips for survival if this ever happens to you. READ NOW

SNAPSHOT: What does an agent do for writers? (FREE for members) Join Diana Beaumont as she explains what her job as a literary agent means for an author, and what you can expect her to do for you. WATCH NOW

Content corner: How to tell if your agent is “the one” As those of you who are submitting know, getting an agent is so difficult, that it can be seen as the end goal. But when you do get that “yes” – things can get competitive and move very fast. So, it’s worth being prepared to suddenly be the one in control and perhaps even having your pick of agents to choose from. So – who do you pick? Firstly – make sure you meet as many as you can, or at least chat to them over the phone. You’re going to want to check out their track record, as well as ask them what their plans are for your book. Do they have edits? Do they want to send out quickly? And to what editors will they be sending? Mainly though, it will come down to your gut feeling. The right agent for you is the one who gets your book and sees a long-term career for you. They will be passionate, enthusiastic and open. You might not stay with your agent for your entire career, but it’s worth being sure that you see your relationship lasting for more than one book. Take your time – and trust your gut. Do you have tips for writers who are struggling to choose the right agent? Share your thoughts in the Townhouse. (Not signed up for a free Townhouse account yet? Sign up here.) Sarah J

Cartoon

Follow us on Instagram for more of our 'The Life of a Writer' cartoon series by our very talented Stephanie!

As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact Stephanie on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice. Best wishes, Sarah Juckes Author | Jericho Writers *or if you're in the US, give us a call toll free on 1-800 454 2134

Plus – don’t miss Jericho / Greene & Heaton Bursary for Under-represented writers Deadline 21 May 2019. If you’re an under-represented writer with a draft of a manuscript, you could win a place on the next Self-Edit Your Novel tutored course, plus a special meeting with literary agents. Slushpile Live with Hardman & Swainson (Members only) 14 May 2019. We’ve commandeered literary agents Joanna Swainson and Thérèse Coen from Hardman & Swainson, to read your submissions in a live webinar online. The Ultimate Novel Writing Course 17 Sept 2019. Combining the best Jericho Writers has to offer, this course offers everything you need to take an idea to publication. Includes a weekend ticket to the Festival of Writing and a full Manuscript Assessment.

JOIN US

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560 A special announcement this May So, it’s official. We’ve given the Townhouse a firm handshake and a pat on the back, and sent it down the river in a blaze of glory. Here's your official (and exciting) announcement on what is taking its place. We’ll also get the low-down on other exciting stuff happening this month, including live events happening on and offline. Introducing your new TOWNHOUSE community – Open now, and 100% FREE Okay, imagine we have an expensive bottle of something that we’re smashing on the hull of a brand-new snazzy forum. Got it? SMASH! Your new Townhouse community offers you the chance to engage publicly on forums, as well as create private groups, send instant messages to friends and even create your own blog! This brand-spanking new platform is built to last – possibly forever. So, why not head over now and take a look around? This community is open to the public and completely free, so there will be lots of chances to gather a following for your work and connect with new friends. CREATE YOUR FREE ACCOUNT Coming up... 14th May Slushpile Live with Hardman & Swainson (Members only) Join us and two literary agents from Hardman & Swainson, as they react to your submissions, live in this webinar, just for members of Jericho Writers. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a member, now would be a good time to join! REGISTER NOW 18th May Self-Edit Your Novel workshop – London (Discounts for members) There’s only ONE space remaining on this one-off special workshop, from the tutor of the bestselling Self-Edit Your Novel tutored course. Join Debi Alper for an intense day that will help you turn your first draft into something ready for publication. FINAL TICKET REMAINING 21st May Jericho / Greene & Heaton Bursary deadline (Open to everyone) Are you an under-represented writer who has a manuscript that needs whipping into shape? Then enter for the third bursary round before the deadline this month. You could win a fully-funded place on Debi’s Self-Edit Your Novel tutored course (online), as well as the chance to meet agents from Greene & Heaton literary agency. ENTER NOW See you for more inside the new Community! As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact Stephanie on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice. Best wishes, The Jericho writers Team *or if you're in the US, give us a call toll free on 1-800 454 2134 Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

A golden age

The market for traditionally marketed fiction is under pressure. I won’t even reiterate those pressures here; I’ve banged on about the in the past, and will do so again in time to come. Suffice to say that Amazon isn’t going to become less dominant. Self-publishers aren’t going to curl up and go away. And supermarkets are not about to turn into book-supporting, culture-nurturing, publisher-loving behemoths. But there’s one area of the book market that always was strong, has grown still stronger, and looks set for still further growth. In short, I want to talk a little about non-fiction, which is something these emails don’t talk enough about. So we’ll talk non-fiction in a second, but first, and with a tarantaraa, and a small but energetic parade made up of: A large but docile elephant 12 dancers wearing ostrich feathers A plump DJ dressed in a gold suit A troupe of cold-looking children in fancy dress A brass band from South Wales Somebody’s dog It is my pleasure to announce that the Old Townhouse is dead. It has been blasted into a shower of binary, a fading wave of bits and bytes. In its place – a new Townhouse, a Townhouse reborn. This new Townhouse is an online community for writers – for people like you, in fact. It is completely free. It costs not a farthing, not a dime, not a sou, not a kopek. It’s a place where you can talk to others about writing. Where you can solicit critiques of your work. Where you can offer critiques in return. Where you can discuss the ins and outs of agents, publishers, self-pub, and everything else that lies beneath our inky sun. Q: How do you gain access to this little wonderland? A: You go here, my little dumpling, and hit “Join us”:

SIGN UP TO TOWNHOUSE

Please note that this is a new service, on a new platform, so any old usernames and passwords you may have will not be recognised. So you do want Join us, not Login. You’ll be sent a verification email as part of that sign up process. Some users have reported that the email has ended up in their spam folder, so if it doesn’t come through within a minute or so, you may have to hunt it down. Please note that because Townhouse is a completely free service, we can’t act as an IT helpdesk for it. If you have troubles signing up, please ask a friend to help. If you have troubles navigating once you’re in, please ask other users for advice. We simply aren’t resourced to help out. Sorry. (Though the system is blindingly simple and has been tested by an entire cave full of Transylvanian tech-dwarves. You should encounter precisely no problems at all.) Phew. OK. Non-fiction. So: non-fiction is having something of a golden age. People seem to be reading more of it than ever before. There are various theories as to why this is, but my own answer is that non-fiction is the one area where Amazon and trad publishing form a kind of perfect marriage. Trad publishing is brilliant at finding, nurturing and releasing books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, or Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or Lars Mytting’s weird hit Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. Self-publishers can’t easily compete on that territory, because so many of the biggest non-fiction hits are one-offs, and self-pub marketing tactics all revolve around series promotions. At the same time, book stores can’t easily stock all the non-fiction being published, because their shelves just aren’t large enough. But Amazon can. And we readers can find whatever we want, whenever we want it, from Amazon. And while readers seem to like their fiction digital nowadays, we still have a preference for reading non-fiction in hard copy, so the market for “online print” is far more buoyant in non-fiction than it is in fiction. Long story short: trad publishers can go on producing beautiful non-fiction, Amazon can sell it, and we can read it. Everyone’s happy. (And indeed, even indie bookstores are happy, because they can use Amazon as a kind of proving ground to see what’s popular, then they can stock their shops with whatever works and watch it fly.) What does that mean for you? Well, I don’t know, of course: I don’t know what your passions are, or where your experience or knowledge lies. But here are some thoughts: Professional experience People love access to specialist and exotic worlds, especially if those worlds offer some interesting light on the one we live in. A perfect example of this would be Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, a collection of stories from Marsh’s experience as a brain surgeon. That book did so well because you can’t get a profession much more specialist and exotic than brain surgery – and yet the actual subject matter of the book rides the line where consciousness meets matter, a topic of universal interest and relevance. As a recipe for a non-fiction hit, you can’t really beat that. The tiny thing that reveals a big one Another brilliant formula for a non-fiction hit is to choose some object or type of thing, and see what happens when you view the world through that prism. A current hit of exactly this type is Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s Extraordinary Insects: Weird, Wonderful, Indispensible. The ones who run our world. Giulia Enders’s Gut, would be another good example of the genre. I’ve happened to choose a couple of science-led subjects there, but you could equally well choose a city, or a theme from history, or a food ingredient, or anything that opens out to reveal a world bigger than you’d first imagined. Novelistic approach For all that we love non-fiction, the basic disciplines of story and vivid telling remain constant. If you have an interest in creative non-fiction, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the skills you need are those of a novelist. Good writing sells. Now yes, some of these books are frankly intimidating. Henry Marsh spent an entire career as brain surgeon before writing his bestselling books on the subject. That’s one heck of an apprenticeship, to put it mildly. But the truth is, if you have a passion and are a good writer, you can write a book that sells. I wrote and sold a book of popular history (This Little Britain) without even having a history degree. I just like the subject I wrote about, and wrote about it well enough to engage a publisher’s enthusiasm. The other huge advantage of non-fiction is that (oh joy!) you can sell the book before you’ve written it. With this his Little Britain, my agent and I made the sale off the back of about 10,000 words of actual text. That, plus an outline of the rest of the book. I hadn’t actually researched the rest of the book, so my outline was wildly sketchy. But 4th Estate (my eventual publisher) didn’t care. They just trusted me to get on with it. If you want more non-fiction loveliness, then here’s a full account of how to put together a book proposal. That’s all from me. Now pluck some apple blossom and put it in a vase. I did that yesterday and how nice it looks. Harry

PS: I’m a human, you’re a human, so let’s talk. But let’s not talk by Smelly Old Email. Let’s go to our brand new Townhouse and chat there. Get yourself signed up, logged in, then we’ll rendezvous here. I’ll supply the mint tea. You bring the macaroons. PPS: Need I remind you that Jericho Writers membership remains the very best way to get yourself tooled up for this difficult profession of ours. Courses on How To Write, Getting Published, and Self-Publishing Success, plus a suite of films, masterclasses, access to AgentMatch, and so much more. Info here if you haven’t already checked it out.

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

Pen-y-cwm – the end of the valley

So: today we’re doing my favourite thing. We’re actually talking about writing. And, you know what? I’d told myself yesterday that we’d do something wholesome like talking about points of view and how to handle multiple protagonists. But now that I’m actually at the laptop, I don’t want to do that at all. Instead: I want to talk about something that I have a real passion for and is, I think, one of the things that I do well as a writer. That thing is turning place into character, and using place as a whole extra (and brilliantly enjoyable) layer of storytelling. Before we get there, two short housekeeping notices. Housekeeping Notice the First: early-bird sales for the Festival have gone stormingly well, but we’re closing the early-bird pricing at the end of this weekend. So if you want your 20%-off ticket, you need to fly along to this link before midnight on Sunday. There’ll be no second chances. Housekeeping Notice the Second: For the past several months, we’ve been cooking up a surprise for y’all. That surprise is an online writing community that’s going to be completely free, only for writers, and will be as slick and beautiful and easy to use as anything anywhere. That’s the good news – and I’ll give you full details when we’re ready to launch – but the flipside of that same golden coin is that we’re going to be dematerialising our existing Jericho Townhouse at the same time. So if you do have material on Townhouse, and if that material is precious to you, please take a copy now. We’ll be decommissioning that site over the weekend of 26-28th April. Jericho Members will get separate messages to remind them of this. Right. Boring bits done. On with the sermon. And here’s the thing, it’s easy to let place drift to the bottom of your novel-writing priorities. Often the issue is a combination of factors. One, you’ve got a lot to think about and place doesn’t often leap to the top of the list. Two, maybe you’re dealing with places that seem very familiar to you, and it’s hard to see your readers wanting to hear about them too much. Three, if you do make mention of place, your first attempts at those descriptions seem a little bland, so you end up chopping that text out in the edits. Well, yes: I’ve made those errors myself. But, oh my friend, do not be lured away by the Place Doesn’t Matter demons. They are temptresses and their gift is wailing (and rejection letters.) If you’re still tempted by those demons, just think about why we read in the first place. Yes, we want to read a story, but in particular we want to experience story through the eyes of one or more central characters. And if that story is to engage our emotions it needs to feel real. The experience of your main character in their fictional world needs to feel as believable as your own experience of the world. In other words: if your novel doesn’t have a credible and compelling sense of place, your reader will feel that little bit removed from your character – and your story has just lost power. Quite unnecessarily too. That’s the why. The how is simple too. You need to:

Say something descriptive about your setting fairly early on in a scene. You’re talking, probably, about a couple of sentences. Keep nudging at that description as you go through the scene. A sentence here, a phrase there. Anything to keep the action physically anchored in your location. How much description? Well, you need to play this by ear, really. If you’re in a complex and exotic location, which impinges strongly on your character, you’ll need more than two sentences to start off with, and the nudges will be more frequent and more insistent. If on the other hand, you’re in a location you’ve used a lot before, you’ll tend to be fairly brief (and probably allude to any observable changes to the setting. “The canteen was empty now, or almost. A couple of uniformed officers were drinking coffee and …”)

That’s kinda obvious and boring, but it gets more interesting:

As a human, you need physical data to help you navigate the world without bumping into things, but that physical data doesn’t particularly engage your emotions. So when you’re writing, your task is not to supply anything much in terms of useful physical data. Rather, your task is to pick out those elements of the location that will engage your point-of-view character at an emotional/visceral level. And once you’ve grasped that point, then it starts getting quite exciting – because what emotional elements of a location do you want to bring out? The answer there, is that the location itself is almost certainly neutral. But your story/scene isn’t neutral. Your character isn’t neutral. So the thing that gives your location its atmosphere will be whatever quality in that place most reverberates with the emotional action of the story. Exciting, right? And there are two broad ways you can go. You can have locations that are complementary to the action (a proposal scene in a rose garden, say.) Or you can have ones that clash or reverberate interestingly with the action. (For example, you set that romantic proposal scene in a multi-storey carpark when it’s kicking down with rain outside.)

Now there’s quite a lot more to be said here. Jericho members can go and fill their boots with this video on place and this one on appearances, which is also stuffed full of place-related material. But next week, I think it would be fun to pick this up again, and I’d like to make use of some of your work. So please, if you want, send me a chunk of text that embodies place in a satisfying way. Absolute limit of 200 words per chunk, please. No more than one chunk per writer. I’ll pick 2-3 of those and we’ll look at them next week. Oh yes, and right down at the bottom of the PSes, I’ve shoved a chunk of text from my book, This Thing of Darkness. The scene is set on a fishing trawler in the East Atlantic. My cop, Fiona Griffiths, is there undercover as a cleaner/cook. The sea is rising. There’s all manner of naughty stuff about to happen. And the scene below has absolutely no story-relevance at all. It’s just a way to get that place, that environment as alive and vivid as possible before the denouement finally denoues. Have fun. Write well. See you soon. Harry

PS: Got something to tell me? Well, I am a human and … oh heck, you know the drill. PPS: Want housekeeping reminders? The Festival money-off link is here. And we’re killing the existing Jericho Townhouse to replace it with something a million times better. So if you have material on the existing Townhouse, please copy it now. You’ll lose it if you don’t. PPPS: Hate writing? Why not farm carp instead? Meantime, unsubscribe to these emails. They are seldom carp-related. PPPPS: Here’s that chunk of text I mentioned. There’s a kind of madness present in this scene and, though no violence takes place, you can feel the possibility of it at every movement. Look at the nouns I use too – guts, slime, eel, python, muscle, clatter, pumps, compressors, assault, seaspray, and so on. Nouns are an incredibly emphatic way to bolt down a sense of place. It’s a pretty reliable rule, in fact: if the nouns are interesting, the description is too. And if they’re not, it isn’t. With a little luck, and even stripped of context, this scene will make you feel (a bit) as though you’re actually there. Here goes: The room [where the fish are processed] is awash. With sea water tramped in from outside. With the fresh water used to clean blood from the gutted fish. With guts and slime. I use a plastic broom to sweep the mess into a corner. Try to slide a shovel under the slippery pile before the moving deck heaves it aside and away from my bucket, a thing the size of a laundry-basket. One time, the pile includes an eel – or something like that, a sea serpent, I want to say, a python of the deep – and the damn thing evades my shovel every time I try to lift it. Slithering away as if still alive. A six foot cord of black and glistening muscle, ending in a mouth large enough to swallow itself. Buys and Coxsey are on processing duty, and Buys watches my efforts with a bloodshot eye. He says nothing. The ship is, in any event, by now so noisy – with the engines, the clatter of processing machinery, the pumps and compressors, the unceasing assault of waves against the hull – that we don’t talk except when we need to. And when we need to, we shout, mouth to ear. Gestures big, emphatic and repeated. Swearwords falling like seaspray. Another attempt with the shovel, another failure. I’ve been awake twenty-one hours now – Honnold gave me three hours off, but I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even lie down really – and I don’t know what to do. Don’t know how to get the fucking eel into the fucking bucket. Keep trying, keep failing, as the ship bucks and the greenish light clots the air. Buys drops his filleting knife. Those things are so fearsomely sharp that they snick through a fish as long as a man’s forearm with only a whisper of effort. The knife rattles around the steel fish tray, as though in search of its next victim. Buys approaches. Demented as I am, as he is, I think, He’s going to hit me. I can’t get the eel into the bucket and Jonah Buys is going to hit me. I sort of accept it, too. There’s an internal logic in my head which says, That’s only fair. Your job was to get the eel in the bucket and you were given a fair old try at it. You’ve no reason to complain. But Buys doesn’t hit me. Just takes the shovel from my hand, and with three or four smashing blows splits the eel into rags. Doesn’t divide it cleanly, by any means, but leaves the thing in a series of bloody stumps, connected by tatters of skin and the white threads of exposed nerves. Buys fixes me with that bloodshot eye, nods, goes back to his knifework. My shovel has no problem now heaving the mass into my bucket. It feels as though the world has become more orderly. Ah yes, that’s how you clean a room. You smash any once-living creature into fist- and foot-sized fragments, then just shovel it away. I carry my bucket over to the trash chute, where our discards go, and send the eel, and all its fishy co-travellers, to the next stop on their black roads.

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

1-year anniversary special! On 10th April 2018, we decided to do something a bit different. We re-launched our established editorial consultancy; ‘The Writers Workshop’, as ‘Jericho Writers’, with a brand-new name, website and offering. Why? So we could offer the writers we worked with more tools, opportunities and advice, for a price that was manageable. It’s been an incredible year of ups and downs, but we are so, so pleased with the results. We’re now helping more writers than ever before and that is quite literally, all down to you. So this newsletter is a bit special. It’s a celebration of everything we have achieved together this year, as well as a heartfelt ‘thank you’ from us. Here's to another amazing year!

FLASH COMPETITION: Win a FREE annual membership To celebrate our first year as Jericho Writers, we’re giving away 10 FREE annual memberships. To win, simply email info@jerichowriters.com with the opening line from your latest book or short story before this Friday 12th April. Entries will be judged by the in-house team and winners notified before the end of the month. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to acknowledge receipt on this one. Good luck!

JOIN US

Spotlight – our favourite picks from our first year

FEATURE: Behind-the-scenes of a major publisher (FREE for members) How can we have a highlights email without including our ground-breaking film behind-the-scenes at Orion books? With interviews from all major departments, this is your ultimate guide to traditional publishing and shines a light on the process like never before. WATCH NOW

AGENTMATCH: US Literary Agent Listings (FREE for members) This year, we added US literary agent listings to our comprehensive database of agents, giving writers more opportunities to find the right home for their writing. SEARCH HERE

COURSE: The How To Write video course (FREE for members) A huge part of the value of Jericho Writers is in our video courses – perhaps no more so than the How To Write course. These modules contain essential tips that you can come back to book-after-book. TAKE THE COURSE

Content corner: What do you want to see from Jericho Writers? vJericho Writers was created from own needs and desires as writers. In the next year, we want to turn this power over to our members, so we can create a platform that offers you the video content, live events and opportunities to take your work to the next level and beyond. We’re already setting up further links with the US to provide more and more content from the heart of the American publishing industry, alongside what we already offer in the UK. We’re also planning on increasing our live webinars over the next year; investing in an expanding our Townhouse forum and even looking at turning Jericho Writers into a kind-of mini-publisher itself! But what do you want to see? Is there a person you wish we’d interview? Is there an opportunity you think would help you get published? Is there something we’re not even doing yet that you wish we would? Join Jericho Writers now and have your say. Here's to an exciting 2019 and beyond! Sarah J

Cartoon

Follow us on Instagram for more of our 'The Life of a Writer' cartoon series by our very talented Stephanie!

As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact Stephanie on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice. Best wishes, Sarah Juckes Author | Jericho Writers *or if you're in the US, give us a call toll free on 1-800 454 2134

Plus – don’t miss Slushpile LIVE with Hardman & Swainson (Members only) 14 May 2019. Join us and two agents from Hardman & Swainson as we read your submissions live in this exciting webinar. Members only. The Self-Edit Your Novel Day – LONDON (Discounts Available for members) 18 May 2019. Due to popular demand, we’re taking tutor-extraordinaire Debi Alper on the road to London, for an exclusive day workshop based on her bestselling course. Copy editing services (Discounts available for members) Does your prose need a little love? Our eagle-eyed copy-editors and proof-readers are on hand to check for consistency and spelling errors – perfect for anyone self-publishing.

JOIN US

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

When supermarkets rule …

I mentioned last week that I’d have some more titbits from my recent agent chat – and, sure enough, that’s all coming up. First, though, as you probably know, we’ve just launched our Festival of Writing, with a cracking 20% Early Bird price discount. (More info here.) That discount only runs for another week or so, so I thought I’d say something about what the Festival is and who it is/isn’t right for. Before that, however, a confession: When we were preparing to run our first Festival, I kept struggling with two feelings. One was sheer anxiety: would anyone come? Would we be able to get agents and other industry pros to the event? Would the whole thing be a rank disaster? Since the Festival costs an absolute minimum of £50,000 to put on (and, in practice, a good bit more than that), I was frankly terrified. If we didn’t sell enough tickets, I’d make a huge loss, and that would not have been a great conversation round the marital dinner table. The second feeling, though, was simply: did anyone actually need this Festival? We’d always told clients (and still do) that agents’ slushpiles represent THE front door into the traditional industry. It was just fine to send your stuff off to an agent with whom you had absolutely zero previous contact – and if your book was good enough, it would be taken on. That was true then. It’s still true now. So why the Festival? And I still don’t really have an answer to that question. I’m no longer unsure about the basic quality of the event. On the contrary: a kind of magic happens there, and it happens reliably every year and to a zillion different types of author too. But why? What’s special? What’s the magical ingredient? And that’s where I fall a bit short. The main thing, I think, is the synchronicity of everything. So you might go to a plotting workshop in the morning, have an agent one-to-one in the afternoon, have a brilliant conversation with a fellow writer at dinner – and something similar all the next day too – and the result is just more than the sum of its parts. It’s not simply that you come away with a solution to the plot niggle in Part Two. It’s not just that you made real contact with an agent, whose encouraging you to follow-up. It’s that you’ve changed. You’ve become a different, more capable, more confident writer. There’s stardust too. So let’s say your novel is really good and ready for launch. If you stand up in front of a 300+ audience on Friday night and read your work out and people love it – well, magic happens. The first person to have won that Friday Night Live competition left the Festival with 7 agents wanting to represent her, then went on to experience a highly contested auction … and ended up having a major bestseller. Would that outcome have happened without the Festival? Well, yes, it could have done. But no question, the Festival adds an ingredient there, a buzz of excitement, that rippled right on through the publishing process before splashing to shore on the bestseller lists. That buzz is the thing that the industry always craves, that it fights to achieve and usually can’t. Well, the Festival can and routinely does. It’s a bit of magic on the magic. So who should come to the Festival? Who shouldn’t? Well, let’s deal with the “probably not”s first. The Festival probably isn’t right for you if you write non-fiction (with the exception of narrative non-fiction). If you write only short stories or flash fiction or poetry, it probably isn’t right for you either. If you are already properly published or confidently self-publishing, you may not have a lot to learn there. If you are really only just starting out with your writing, then the Festival might be for you – just be aware that you’ll be in the company of writers who are mostly more experienced than you. If you think that’ll be intimidating, then avoid the Festival this year, and come next year instead. If you think that’ll be inspiring, you should certainly come. The Festival has a really warm and inclusive atmosphere, so you shouldn’t experience anything other that positivity and encouragement. As for the, who should come half of the question – well, I think the Festival should suit anyone with a full length novel, either written or well under way, and who has a serious intention to seek traditional publication. I can’t imagine being that writer and not getting a lot from the Festival. After all, the entire thing is designed around you, and your needs and your questions and the ingredients that we know will help you grow. If you are just such a writer, we’d LOVE to see you there. Every single year, the Festival is my favourite weekend. And it’s because of you guys. The enthusiasm, the belief, the warmth, the community. I love it! (Oh, and we’re no longer terrified of making a loss! We don’t, in fact, generate huge profits from the event, but at least we know the damn thing won’t bankrupt us. Phew!) Again, if you want the money-off link, it’s here. The Festival Programme can be found here. Right. Enough of that. Agents. The market. What do publishers want? And I think the answer can be summed up in three broad generalisations. First, this is a great time for intelligent, broad spectrum non-fiction. So if you’re a neurologist with interesting material on (say) memory, or creativity, or nature / nurture, or love, then there’s a publisher who wants your book. Equally, there’ll be publishers who want books on current affairs, on history, on politics, on science, and much else. The big challenge for such writers is writing a genuinely popular book. That is, you need to take relatively technical academic research and present it in a way that genuinely engages a broad (but intelligent) audience. The go-to author for this kind of writing is Malcolm Gladwell. He delivers real intelligence, with the grip of a thriller. That’s the aim. If you’re deeply interested in a given non-fiction topic, but don’t have a natural platform (that is: you aren’t an academic or other qualified professional), you don’t have to give up. I’m not a historian – didn’t even study the topic at university – but it’s something that has always interested me. So I wrote a book of popular history (this one). I wasn’t going to be able to use my great academic platform to launch the work, so I had to rely on just writing damn well. Making the book funny, interesting, engaging. Publishers didn’t even really ask me whether I knew my stuff – they just believed me – and they liked the text. So after an intensely contested auction, I sold that book for more cash than anything else I’ve ever written. If we were selling it today, we might even make more. That’s one generalisation about what publishers want today. The second one is this: This is a great time to write big, high-concept standalone books. That sort of sounds obvious, but it’s a little less obvious than it sounds. In the old days, when bookstores sold more, and the supermarkets sold less, publishers really wanted the kind of writer they could turn into a series. So police procedural authors (like Ian Rankin or Michael Connelly) were really hot. By buying and establishing a great first-in-series book, publishers could make great money for dozens of books thereafter. These days, supermarkets increasingly dominate the way publishers think about the world and supermarkets are a terrible place to launch and sustain any kind of series fiction. Yes, supermarkets might buy a ton of your terrific book #1, but there’ll be nothing in them that makes them think, “Better stock book #2 when it comes out, otherwise we’ll be letting down our customers.” They need to keep books on the shelves, same as they need to keep beans on the shelves, but they aren’t there to provide a rounded book-purchasing experience. And they don’t care either: their customers come for the beans, and might buy a book. Of the two, the beans matters more. So standalones do well. And given that supermarkets are selling to not-very-committed readers, you really want a standalone with a concept that drives sales from the title, cover and shoutline alone. Sure, you need to deliver good back-of-book blurb as well. But the actual text? It just matters less to these kind of purchasing decisions. Think of your own habits. In a bookstore or on Amazon, you may well browse a few pages before buying a book. In a supermarket, that just feels out of place. If the price is right, and the jacket looks great, you pop the book in your basket, and go on to pick up the beans. That means, you really need to work your elevator pitch hard. If you want some examples of great shoutlines, then how about:

I Let You Go, Clare Mackintosh: “A tragic accident. It all happened so quickly. She couldn't have prevented it. Could she?” The front cover made a big deal about the mid-book twist, so buyers knew (a) the basic set up for the story, and (b) that there was a big twist in store. That plus a tear-jerky title, plus a brilliant cover proved to be marketing gold. Her Last Tomorrow, Adam Croft: Could you murder your life to save your daughter? This is actually a brilliantly marketed self-pub book – but that tagline could have sold the book in shedloads on any platform at all. It’s a model of how to do it.

For what it’s worth as well, the standalone geo-political thriller has made a big comeback, after long years in the wilderness. Thank Trump, Putin, Xi and Brexit for that. Finally, literary fiction has become increasingly tough to place in Big 5 firms (because the sales just aren’t there.) But the flipside of that is that there’s an increasingly vibrant and exciting micro-publisher world for difficult, interesting, challenging literary work. So if you’re writing something of that sort, you may not get the deal with Penguin that you always wanted … but the indie publisher options are better now than they’ve been for decades. That’s it from me. Sorry about the length of this email. I’ve given you some incredibly meagre PSes by way of apology. Till soon Harry

PS: Got something to tell me? Well, I am a human and … oh heck, you know the drill. PPS: Want that money-off Festival link again? Tis here. PPPS: Hate writing? Want to make the world’s most over-the-top Easter Bonnet? Unsubscribe to these emails now. They’ll only distract you.

Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560

Top tips for landing an agent In this newsletter, we’re focusing on how you can approach an agent and hopefully land a book deal. As well as hearing this straight from the horse’s (or rather – agent's) mouth, we also have some Slushpile Playbacks and a brand new Slushpile date to pop in your calendars, so you can put this all into action. EVENT: Festival of Writing Earlybird – 20% Discount (for everyone!) That’s right – the Festival of Writing is BACK for 2019! Get 20% off weekend tickets when you book before 14 April. Attend workshops, polish your writing, have one-to-ones with agents and generally have the best time of your life in York this September. BOOK YOUR TICKET JOIN US NEW on Jericho Writers MASTERCLASS: How to approach an agent (FREE for members) Filmed live at the Festival in 2018, we hear from super-agent Richard Pike as he tells us how to prepare to submit to agents, how to create the ultimate submission and what to expect after you press ‘send’. WATCH NOW BLOG: Getting the agent and deal you really want Author and tutor James Law reveals how he set his sights on his publishing ‘dream’, and the steps he took to achieve it. READ NOW PLAYBACK: Slushpile Live Sessions (FREE for members) Missed the last few Slushpile Live sessions? We’ve added playback recordings to the website now, so you can watch them again. WATCH NOW Content corner: True fact: Agents are real people There was a time when I thought of agents as untouchable celebrities. The mere thought of actually seeing one in the wild was terrifying and brilliant. I mean – these are the guys who could change your life with just one email. Working with Jericho Writers has ruined all of that. Thanks to after-Festival parties and Slushpile Sessions, I’ve come to realise that agents are in fact REAL PEOPLE. They watch all the terrible shows I do on Netflix. They like to spend weekends in their pyjamas. They will make FULL-USE of a free bar or buffet. So, it's worth bearing this in mind when you approach an agent. Instead of making the mistake I did five years ago, when I ran away from anyone I thought might be one, chat to them face-to-face about TV, or show them cute pictures of dogs. And if you’re submitting to them, use their first name. Take a look at the stuff they chat about on Twitter and include it in your cover letter. As real-life-normal people, they may well appreciate it. Sarah J Cartoon Follow us on Instagram for more of our 'The Life of a Writer' cartoon series by our very talented Stephanie! As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact Stephanie on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice. Best wishes, Sarah Juckes Author | Jericho Writers *or if you're in the US, give us a call toll free on 1-800 454 2134 Plus – don’t miss Slushpile LIVE with Hardman & Swainson (Members only) 14 May 2019. Join us and two agents from Hardman & Swainson as we read your submissions live in this exciting webinar. Members only. The Self-Edit Your Novel Day – LONDON (Discounts Available for members) 18 May 2019. Due to popular demand, we’re taking tutor-extraordinaire Debi Alper on the road to London, for an exclusive day workshop based on her bestselling course. Agent Submission Pack Review (Discounts available for members) We’ll review your synopsis, query letter and the opening 5,000 words of your manuscript. We know exactly what agents are looking for and we’ll give you detailed, rigorous feedback on your submission. JOIN US Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560 Get 20% off tickets to The Festival of Writing for 2 weeks only That’s right folks – the Festival of Writing is BACK and boy, do we have a colossal line-up for you this year. For the next 2 weeks only, you can get 20% off your ticket price, as well as secure the best one-to-one sessions, workshops and (new to 2019) Book Labs – before they run out. GET YOUR TICKET "Mind blowing...” - Pearl H. The Festival of Writing is a unique weekend packed full of workshops, special events and one-to-ones for writers at all stages of their career. Every year, writers leave York with offers of representation from agents, a notebook brimming with ideas and the tools they need to make their book happen. Choose from a selection of workshops and one-to-ones to build your perfect writing Festival, and find friends who will stay with you for life. Whether this is your first time attending, or you’ve been every year since it began 12 years ago – you are sure to find a warm welcome. There is something very special about The Festival of Writing and we’d love for you to experience it first-hand. NEW for 2019! You said you wanted the chance to workshop your own writing at the Festival – and we listened. Introducing the brand-new, 2-hour BOOK LABS to Saturday morning at the Festival. These intimate sessions will include a maximum of twenty writers, working with a world-class tutor on your own writing. Warning – places on specific sessions are limited, so book now to avoid disappointment! SEE THE FULL PROGRAMME Remember – this Earlybird offer is available until 14th April ONLY. We really hope you can make it and look forward to meeting you in person! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us on info@jerichowriters.com. The Jericho Writers Team GET YOUR TICKET Copyright © 2018 Jericho Writers, All rights reserved. Want to stop The Festival of Writing campaign emails?  Click here Jericho Writers Belsyre Court 57 Woodstock Road Oxford, OX2 6HJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 345 459 9560