During this engaging session Sarah talked us through the ten biggest problems she sees in unpublished manuscripts which prevent them leaping the gap to publication.

The first five of these related to the characters themselves.
  1) Our characters need to take risks and do things, not just have great ideas they never act on.
  2) Readers want to read about characters they care about and as writers we need to build that rapport straight away or the reader will stop reading.
  3) Our characters need to fight for things that other people would fight for so the reader can tap into their emotions and care about what they care about.
  4) Our characters need to have core qualities that make them likeable such as loyalty, generosity and honesty.  They still need shade to make them human but their bad qualities should be in addition to their core qualities not instead of them.
  5) Our characters should pass ‘The Lift Test’.  We are asking our readers to spend a lot of time with our characters, to be happy if they are effectively stuck in the lift with them.

The second five problems related to the plot and pacing of the novel.
  6) We need to spread the ‘cherries’, that is the really good bits, throughout the novel rather than clumping them all together. 
  7) We need to make the reader wait for the resolution to the problems we set up; to keep our reader in suspense.
  8) We want our readers to be unable to put our books down!  The chapter ends should fall when the action is moving so the reader wants to know what happens next.
  9) No ‘tea drinking’. Characters can always be doing something more active than sitting around drinking tea or partaking of similar passive activities!
  10) We need a balance between active forms, such as action and dialogue and passive forms such as description, retrospection and flashback (which she hates) with the emphasis on the active parts.

Pzazz!
In addition Sarah talked about giving our work ‘Pzazz’ demonstrating with a piece of her own work how writing could be competently written and of serviceable quality but nothing special!

Pzazz is delivered through sparkling dialogue, engaging images and action. These lift a piece to something that is more original and has personality. She suggested putting five pieces of ‘Pzazz’ on each page of our novel.  Our readers make the time commitment to read our book and will feel it is time well spent if, in addition to telling a good story, we give them sharp phrases and write in an interesting way.

Written by Joanna Brown