The Spring Away Day is always a highlight of our year at BPA, and it was wonderful to meet so many writers from across the country at this year’s event on Saturday April 22. Author Emma Darwin began the day with a ‘First Draft to Final Draft’ workshop. She discussed the idea that you write the first draft for yourself, the second for your reader, and the third for your agent, saying that the third draft is an act of persuasion: ‘The reader has to agree to forget that this is fiction.’ She added that many writers write a lot more than three drafts!

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Emma had lots of brilliant suggestions for ways of taming your first draft. One was writing a three-sentence chapter breakdown. ‘For each chapter, write 1. how things stand at the beginning, 2. what happens, and 3. the outcome at the end of the chapter.’ If one isn’t different to three, you need to do some work.’ Another idea was to create a theme mind-map with single words, phrases, myths and quotations. Emma believes it’s a good idea to split up problem finding and problem solving: ‘If you don’t want to print it out, use track changes. Try to get a sense of separation and prepare yourself for the new draft.’

The group discussed works-in-progress over a locally prepared lunch of bang bang chicken, glass noodle salad, and spinach and gruyère quiche. The weather was just nice enough for many of the guests to take their ice-cream pudding for a walk in the grounds and ruminate over the morning’s teaching.

It was interesting to hear about so many different approaches to editing. One guest said she’d heard that Zadie Smith rewrote the opening chapter of one of her novels for six months, then the rest of it flew out of her. There was a good mix of ‘planners’ and ‘pantsers’ in the room, and Emma discussed the pros and cons of both: ‘If you draft all the way through you’ve got an amazing sense of energy, but there are bound to be structural issues. Doing lots of planning can be really healthy but this approach has its own problems.’ Soon we dispersed around the house for personal writing time. From the pace of the keypad tapping and biro scribbling, it seemed people were feeling inspired!

Emma concluded the workshop and let us loose on the coffee and cake just as literary agent Katie Fulford from Bell Lomax Moreton arrived. We were grateful to Katie for coming to chat to us after a busy week at the London Book Fair and made sure she was filled up with tea before the Q&A. She shared lots of great insights from the fair: ‘In women’s fiction, people are looking for something a bit different. That’s why Lessons in Chemistry did so well. Psychological thrillers too – it needs to be something really different. Also, a lot of us in the industry are looking for positive endings at the moment. Obviously there needs to be some jeopardy, but I want to feel happy when I’m reading it. Mid-life protagonists are having a moment in a way they never have before. If anyone’s writing a romcom with an older protagonist, I’d love to see that.’

Emma Haynes asked what else was on Katie’s wishlist and she replied, ‘I’d be interested in a really smart, bloodless crime thriller, like Knives Out. I’m fed up with dead women. But I love a story that flips a cliché on its head … dead men.’ Once the laughter had died down, she continued, ‘I’m often drawn to stories about women doing unusual things, feisty women doing something unexpected. I signed a book from a BPA First Novel Award winner recently called Petal. The reason I liked it is it’s about a woman in a man’s world and she’s bossing it.’

I’ll close with a piece of advice from Katie: ‘All agents have a lot of reading so the first page is really important. Don’t worry about it. Don’t throw the kitchen sink at it. But make it the best it can be.’

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Away Day and to our guests, Emma Darwin and Katie Fulford. If you’d like to hear about future events, please sign up to our mailing list or bookmark our events page. You also might like to visit Emma Darwin’s blog, This Itch of Writing.