Jon Harley

#WritersCoffeeClub 9/5/26: Share the first line of your current WIP. Everyone: How enticed are you?
The winter when Enigma's first album came out was a cold one. On the last Saturday before Christmas, [...]

#writingPride 1: Do you have any queer protagonists?
Darling, I don't have any non-queer protagonists. The world already has enough books with straight protagonists. I mean millions of them. It's so boring.

#WritingPride 12: Are your queer characters out to their families?
They come out to their families as part of the story, and it's part of a theme of the subtle class differences between the two of them. Ash (gay and lower-middle-class) comes out to his family one by one, starting with his mum, soon after he goes to university. Roy (bi and working-class) feels the dangers of coming out much more keenly and leaves it until his late 20s, once his brother is married and expecting kids.

#WritingPride 11: Are there any closeted queer characters in your story?
Yes, a teacher. He's so discreet that the protagonists don't realise, but the reader will.

#WritingPride 6: Have you written a character's queer awakening?
Yes. In my completed novel, the bi character discovers the girl he fancies is shagging a guy he fancies, and starts fantasising and thinking through the consequences of that for the first time.
In my WiP, I'm trying to write a trans awakening but it's much more gradual across most of the novel.

#WritersCoffeeClub 7/5/26: Do readers need to understand a character's motivations to understand the story?
Short answer: no, but they aren't going to empathise much with characters whose motivations they have little insight to.
Longer answer: you can divide fiction into character-driven and plot-driven. There are readers who prefer each. I prefer character-driven stories, and delving into the main character's thoughts and motivations is the point for me, making me largely uninterested in books where the plot is the main point of the story, typically in genres like crime and SF. And I'm also less interested in stories where the main character has little or no agency, and so their motivations don't even matter. But in any story, there will usually be some characters who don't have an important bearing on the tale and it's not important to understand their motivations.

#WritersCoffeeClub 2/5/26: Have you ever written a character making one decision, only to later revise them choosing otherwise?
My debut novel "Parallel Lines" is entirely built around this! The two main characters decide to break up, then get back together years later after they've changed and grown. Then, they do it all again a second time.
In real life people change their minds, second-guess themselves and overthink things. It's only realistic to put this in fiction, but it's surprisingly rare.

#WritersCoffeeClub 11/4: What's your most effective method for connecting with readers?
Ask me again when I have a reader. As yet nobody wants to read my writing.

Hmm, maybe that question was supposed to be about me revising character's decisions, not writing about them revising their own decisions. But the latter is really much more interesting. In real life people do that all the time, and in fiction almost never. Most fictional characters are unrealistically decisive and committed.

#WritingPride 15: What role does love (romantic or platonic) play in your queer characters' motivations?
My last novel is a romance between two characters, one gay, one bi. The gay character is strongly motivated by romantic love, and longs to have an "ordinary" relationship but lives in an era when that was not possible. The bi character doesn't think about love much. He's a scientist who likes to think about things which can be measured experimentally, or at least reasoned about rationally, and doesn't really know how to think about relationships (like so many men, especially of his generation).

#writingPride 3: do you have any visibly queer background characters?
In my completed novel, very few, it's set in the 80s (and well outside London) when being visibly queer was very rare. In my stalled WiP, lots. It's set in the 90s in an obscure post-industrial district and nearly everyone who lives there is an artist, a musician, LGBT+ or a combination.

#WritersCoffeeClub 9/4/26: What is your favourite way to introduce a character's appearance?
I would say my favourite way is to do it "naturally", by which I mean, the way real people notice appearance.
So I only mention appearance if there is something that an ordinary person would notice when they looked at the character. For example if someone has an even slightly uncommon feature, such as hair dyed pink, you would notice that, thus you would expect the narrative to tell you. Or if they're wearing different clothes than are usual for the context, that would be worth mentioning.
Otherwise, I only mention appearance if the PoV character has a reason to be paying particular attention to it. In the first chapter of my novel "Parallel Lines" one character is trying to decide if he fancies the other, so there is more description of his face, his haircut etc. If you stare into someone's eyes you would notice their eye colour so I'd mention that then.
Apart from that, I don't mention appearance. Only when it's required by the narrative, is the general rule.
As a reader, I hate it when writers describe appearance for no good reason. Readers have an imagination, and we love to use it, that's why we're readers! I once read a novel where the author mentioned every single character's hair colour as they were introduced. That's terrible writing. I got completely distracted from the story by wondering why the narrator was so obsessed with hair, when it had no bearing at all on the plot.

The magnolia tree outside my window is blossoming. This is not one of its good years; it started budding in December and then there were hard frosts. But it's sunny today, and such flowers as there are, are shining white and pink. One day soon, I will be gone and it will still be here, white and pink in the April sunlight. Maybe someone else will look at it and think about something other than the pointlessness of existing.