This is a sample based on a recent original report. Names, places and themes have been altered to protect the author's privacy. Large sections of the report have been deleted to keep the length manageable. Deletions are indicated by square brackets in the text below.
Summary
Unquiet
Night has some great things going for it. For one thing,
it's absolutely authoritative. I don't know if you've
really been to all the places (and encountered some
of the situations) that you describe. But it feels as
if you have, and that's what matters. For another thing
- and no small thing either - you've got a terrifically
distinctive story to 
tell,
which will really help when it comes to selling you
to publishers (and help them, when it comes to selling
you to bookshops). The whole complex set of African
development issues is very much in the news at the moment,
and this too is a big plus for you. Finally, your capacity
to handle an intricate plot is beyond doubt - something
whose importance once just can't overemphasise for the
kind of market you're aiming at.
But that isn't, I'm afraid, enough. There are some major weaknesses in this manuscript which you will need to address before the book becomes marketable. The weaknesses vary in type and importance, but they all come down to one thing: namely, you haven't yet fully made the transition from writing fairly formal development reports to writing for popular entertainment. That's a perfectly common issue for clients of the WW - and indeed it was a challenge I faced when I started out, so don't worry if what follows seems daunting at first.
I might also add, incidentally, that I strongly agree with the basic premise which underpins your work: namely that international development issues can make for wonderful drama, with some big & important stories well worth digging out. So it's not a question of whether such a thing can be done, it's only a question of execution. And that's what this report will focus on.
[.]
So much for the intro. Now for the nuts and bolts.
Point of view
There are just three ways to write a book. (1) You can use the first person - in which case you can't include any scenes not viewed from that person's perspective. (2) You can pick just one character and write all scenes from his / her point of view. This is, in effect, as restrictive in terms of focus as the first option, but it does allow you as author to develop a narrative voice different from that of your main character. And (3) you can write in the third person, but use multiple viewpoints.
Like some other first-time novelists, you have tried to combine some of these options - in your case, a curious combination of all three.This simply can't and won't work. Since half the book is written from Ashton Corkwell's point of view, how the heck does he know what's going on in scenes where he isn't even present? And then again there are still other scenes where he is the principal protagonist and yet the scene is described in the third person.
This is all much too confusing to the reader. To put the matter at its bluntest, the fact is that this mixture of viewpoints alone will prevent you being taken seriously by any agent, no matter how wonderful everything else may be. So you need to get it right. And it isn't hard. Pick one of the three techniques above and then adhere to it like glue.
If I were advising you to choose, I think I'd have to suggest that you go with option (1) - making Ashton the narrator of the entire book. He's your best developed character and has a voice you're comfortable with. It's also the easiest technique for new novelists. Multiple viewpoints in particular can be hard to manage, and especially hard if you allow the number of viewpoints to spiral above two or three. This is something often not realised by new writers, who are misled by the ease with which TV and cinema handles multiple perspectives. But books aren't movies. If you're a bit unsteady with your viewpoints, then sticking with just the one is the surest recipe to success.
[Discussion of narrative voice.]
[Discussion of overuse of flashbacks / flashforwards]
[Issues to do with the depiction of violence in the work]
Tone
You've taken care to make the development element in your book very accurate. This is very welcome, given the possible risks of political correctness on the one hand and an overly cynical approach on the other. You steer a subtle and credible course between these two shoals, and the book is better for it. But, alas, there are times when your concern for accuracy comes to dominate the tone of your book. If I just flip the book open at a random page, I get:
[ Sample sentences deleted ]
Now this is the heart of what I meant about making the transition from one style of writing (official; fact-based; carefully neutral) to another (entertaining; emotion-based; deliberately colourful, badly behaved, humorous, mouthy, etc). Unfortunately there are too many places where your novel begins to resemble the pages of a World Bank report. (And given what you say on page 76, I know you won't take that as a compliment). Roughly speaking, one of your central challenges will to transform the tone of your book altogether.
In places, I see you have tried quite hard to do this. From page 150 to around page 180, you have moved a lot of the fact-based material into a kind of dialogue format. Sentences such as 'How was the irrigation programme viewed by some of the formerly nomadic tribal leaders in Mali (who may well have had cultural reasons for their economically counterintuitive resistance)?' is not how John B - your tough-talking journo type - would ever possibly speak. What we need to do - and this is certainly something we should talk about later - is try to find a way to bring your knowledge into the book in the right way. But the emphasis is on (i) brevity, and (ii) colour. Some of the details scattered in your penultimate chapter (from the Mauritius landing onwards) are hitting exactly the right notes - more of this please!
[Further discussion of how to transmit information in an entertaining way.]
Physical description and the here and now
One way of controlling the technical elements of your book is by strengthening the other elements. One piece in particular which needs strengthening in your case is a strong sense of the here and now. On the whole, you establish where your character is at the start of a scene, then almost completely forget about the physical thereafter.
That's not good enough. If there's a single reason for the success of the novel as a format, it's this: novels take readers into other times and other places and make those situations more real than the world outside. And that means that you can never allow a scene to drift far from its physical anchoring. It would be a terrific discipline for you to make sure (i) that every single scene is set in a highly identifiable and memorable location and (ii) that every single page of every single scene contains some reminder, large or small, about where the action is taking place in that moment. The second part of this discipline is easy enough to achieve. You simply need to make sure that if your scene is set in a café, say, then at least every page or so there's reference to a coffee refill, or a whistling espresso machine, or the ching of a fruit machine.
The first part is tougher. Memorable locations can mean what it means in James Bond movies - namely, non-stop exotica. Given that you have knowledge of some exotic locations, you should certainly make use of it. But that isn't the only route. The simplest possible setting - a London pub, let's say - can become memorable as long as you the author can find something memorable to say about it. Thus if, for instance, the scene involves the hero being dumped by his girlfriend, you might use a beery rugby crowd as the noisy and insensitive foil to the hero's feelings. Or if you want something quieter, then you might try to exploit the difference between the world indoors - dim, stuffy, glittering with brass and old beams - to the windy spring sunshine of the world beyond the glass. Whatever the situation, you need to find your theme - your metaphor if you like - then run with it. Make sure you don't just stop at visual descriptions. Noises are vital too. So are smells.
Again, all these are common problems for first timers, so don't despair unduly. The key thing for you is to allow yourself to become looser and more expressive in your language. If your previous bosses would hate the kind of prose you are writing now, then you're on the right sort of lines. There are some good techniques for encouraging this sort of loosening, and I'll talk these through with you when we talk all this over.
meantime, I've appended one of our Quick Guides on physical description. Everything in that Guide is relevant to you. The piece gives three examples of physical descriptions. I'd say 50% of your writing currently stops at the first level - and you need to reduce this number to 0%. Most of the rest of what you have on the page now is at the second level - which is OK, but you do still want to aim higher. The Mauritius material shows you can hit the high notes when you're at your best. Our main challenge is to bring as much of the rest as possible to this level.
[Further discussion and attached article not included.]
Character
Whenever there are too many viewpoints in a book, the author loses control of them and the (almost inevitable) result is that none of the characters are as well described as they should be. This is unquestionably a challenge for you.
I'll come to Ashton in a moment, but first a word on your lesser fry. You have clearly understood the need to give your characters identifiable personality traits, but too often you fall into one of two traps. The first trap (again a common pitfall) is cliche. Your journalist drinks a lot, he smokes a lot, he's very cynical, he's been in war zones. Now all that is terribly familiar stuff. If you go on to develop new depths to such people, you can get away with starting in a cliched mode. But you don't. John B doesn't play a huge part in the book, so we never see much more of him than that. And that's not OK. You need to deepen him or (at least) make him less expected. (eg: he's got a big anti-tobacco thing; he's scared of snakes; he keeps a nightlight in his bedroom because he's scared of the dark).
Your second trap is that of inadvertent comedy. N'Kumbe, your hotel doorman, appears twice in the book - appearances separated by some hundred and fifty pages. You're obviously anxious that the reader will have forgotten who he is, so you've given him a scar and a wooden leg and a speech impediment. (I think. I may not have understood this bit). Now that just seems like something from a Marx brothers film. If you have a point to make about conflict, then make it properly. As it is, you create a kind of comedy that I'm sure you don't really mean.
And then there's Ashton.
[Detailed discussion of main character]
Here's an exercise for you which most of my clients have found very helpful. (Not surprising - I use it too. It's not just for beginners this technique.) Start writing down everything you know about Ashton. Everything. The clothes he wears. His looks. His tastes in food. In women. What his laugh sounds like. His relationship with his parents. His deepest unmet need. Why he began traveling to Africa. The things that most frighten him. His favourite colour. What makes him cry. And add anything, no matter how silly, to the list of questions. Does he prefer football or cricket? Wine or beer? What physical characteristic does he least like about himself? And most like?
Just write it all down, not caring about having things in order or being clever or anything else. You should cover at least four pages with your character portrayal, preferably more. And make sure you do this exercise over several days, as you'll never get it all down in one go. Do something similar for your other major characters and watch them fill out as you go. Make sure you avoid cliché, but don't just throw in weirdness (a stutter, a limp, an addiction to pigeon racing) for the sake of it either.
Once you really know your characters, you can begin to rewrite them knowing that your new acquaintance with them is there to be drawn on. (A good test of this is the following: When they speak, do your characters all sound the same or different? In other words, are you able to tell from a single sentence of dialogue who is speaking simply from the way they express themselves? If you can answer yes to this question, then you're in very good shape indeed.)
It would be really great if you could email your 'data-dump' on Ashton before we meet - I think it would be great to be able to talk this over in real detail. Meantime, I'm working to put up a fuller guide on this character exercise on the site, so do check in the next few days to see if it's there.
Plot
[Detailed discussion of plot.]
Other matters
In your cover note, you raised a handful of issues. So here goes .
[Detailed responses to specific questions / issues raised in cover letter.]
Conclusion
[.]
