Sunday Teatime, One Chapter, No Notes: The Unlikely Editor on the Other End of the Phone

It started as an accident, like most of the useful things in my writing life. I'd finished a chapter on a wet Wednesday, felt vaguely pleased with it, and had no one to tell. My critique group didn't meet for a fortnight. My partner had heard enough about the fictional residents of a fictional Yorkshire market town to last a lifetime. So on Sunday, over a cup of tea I'd let go lukewarm, I rang my mum and — before she'd even got through asking whether I was eating properly — said, "Right, can I read you something?"

She said yes. She always says yes. And that was eighteen months ago now, which means she has heard every chapter of my novel at least once, some of them twice, and one particularly stubborn middle section three times because I couldn't work out why it wasn't landing.

The Low-Tech Drafting Tool Nobody Sells You

There is a whole industry built around writing software. Programs that track your word count, colour-code your scenes, nag you with daily targets. I've tried most of them. What I keep coming back to costs nothing: a phone, my mum, and the standard BT-to-BT line quality of a Sunday evening call to Nantwich.

Reading aloud is one of those pieces of advice every writer gets and most of us quietly ignore, because it's embarrassing and your own voice sounds wrong in the room. But reading to someone else is different. You can't skim. You can't let your eye slide over the sentence you've read four times and stopped actually seeing. The phone makes it worse, in a good way — there's no body language to lean on, no nodding along. Just the words, and whatever comes back down the line.

And what comes back down the line, it turns out, is data.

What the Silences Mean

My mum is not a literary critic. Her feedback vocabulary consists mainly of "lovely", "oh I didn't like him", and "go on then, what happens next?". That last one is the gold standard, obviously. But the real information is in everything else: the pauses, the little coughs, the moment she starts doing something else and you can hear a teaspoon clinking against a mug where a sentence used to hold her.

I've learned to read her like a seismograph. A hesitation before a line of dialogue usually means the line is trying too hard. A genuine laugh tells me a joke works even when the critique group flagged it as "maybe too broad". And the time she went quiet for a full eight seconds after a particular revelation in chapter nine — I counted, I had a kettle boiling — told me more about pacing than any workshop exercise ever has. She wasn't bored. She was feeling something. I rewrote the following paragraph to give that feeling room to sit.

The critique groups I've been part of over the years are brilliant at the technical stuff: commas, continuity, whether the dog was called Bertie in chapter two. What they can't reliably tell you is whether a chapter breathes. Mum can. Mum, who has read roughly four books a year since 1974 and knows exactly what she likes, is the closest thing I have to an ordinary reader with no axe to grind and no workshop etiquette to observe.

The Audience Who Loves You Enough to Be Honest

I should say: this only works because of who she is. The danger of using family as a first reader is that they're meant to love you, and loving you is a terrible qualification for editorial feedback. Plenty of writers have been burned by a partner's "it's wonderful, darling" and a novel that was not, in fact, wonderful.

But my mum has a very specific, very British form of honesty: she won't tell you your writing is bad, but she will not pretend to be gripped either. There's a particular flatness to her "mm" that no flattery can fake. When a scene drags, she doesn't say so — she starts telling me about the neighbour's hedge. And I've learned to hear the hedge as a note. This bit, Liam. This bit is the hedge bit.

There's something else, too, which I only really understood recently. Reading to her once a week keeps the novel honest in a bigger sense. It's easy, alone at a desk, to write for the imagined judges — the reviewers, the agents, the version of yourself who's much cleverer than you are. You can't write cleverly for your mum. She'd notice. She'd get lost, or worse, she'd be bored, and the teaspoon would start clinking. So the prose has got plainer and, I think, better. Fewer semicolons. More happening.

A Defence of the Ritual

I know how it sounds. A grown man reading his rough drafts down the phone to his mother every Sunday like it's Blue Peter and the novel is a stranded whale. But the ritual has become load-bearing. It gives the week a shape: whatever state the draft is in by teatime Sunday, it gets read, which means it has to be readable, which means it has to be finished to some standard even if that standard is just "coherent enough for Nantwich".

It's also, I'll admit, a very nice way to spend twenty minutes with my mum, and the novel is a convenient excuse neither of us needs to justify. She asks about the characters like they're distant relatives. She has strong opinions about which of them deserves a happy ending. She once told me, with real sorrow, that she'd "got quite attached to the postman", and I have since given the postman a bigger part.

So if you're stuck, if your critique group has gone quiet for the summer, if the software is nagging and the draft is a swamp: ring someone. Not an editor, not another writer. Someone who reads at normal speed and has no stake in your career. Read them a chapter. Listen for the coughs.

And if they ask "go on then, what happens next?" — write that bit faster. That's the whole job, really.