3 Key Takeaways: The Trench Book – Nick Foulkes

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdr9XBec/

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from The Trench Book by Nick Foulkes. Now this is a bit of a weird one. I actually picked this up at the closing down sale of the brand Aquascutum, which if you don’t know Aquascutum they were a really big deal – and in fact this book talks about how they were founded in the 1800s and they still existed right the way through to I think it was either 2020 or 2021 that they folded and I went to their sale at their flagship in London and picked up a load of cheap clothes and I got this book. Because it’s a book, it was there, it was available, I think if I’m remembering correctly it was £1 – so I thought, you know what? I’m a book girl, I’ve got to pick it up.

Now as I say it is a little odd because it doesn’t say anywhere that it’s sponsored by Aquascutum but it sure as hell talks about Aquascutum a lot and I did pick it up in the Aquascutum shop so it seems like it may be a little biased, I don’t know. Maybe the author just loves the brand and then the brand decided to stock it, I don’t know what the backstory was but let’s get into this. This is very different to what I normally review, it is a lot of pictures, a lot of graphics and design content, a lot lighter on the actual text details but it’s a very valid format of book especially if you’re doing non-fiction so I want to be able to share some things that I learned from it so that if you are a writer you can take those on board and help to  improve your own work. So my first key takeaway from The Trench Book is if you want to have a wider appeal leave your thesaurus on the shelf.

This is such a problem that I have seen so many  times in fashion writing. For those of you who don’t know, my background is not just as a ghostwriter but I’ve also been the Editor-in-Chief of a fashion magazine since 2017 and I’ve worked with so many writers during that time that we’ve brought on board as part of internships that we’ve trained, that we’ve then helped go on to bigger and brighter things. And almost all of them when they first come to us have the same problem which is they sound like they’ve swallowed a thesaurus. A really academic style of writing and I think this is something that people are learning at university. They’re learning to write an essay and then when they get out into the world of journalism, they try and do the same thing and writing a book, writing a news story depending on the outlet, and writing an essay are very very different things and what’s appropriate in tone for one may not be appropriate for another. Now this book is again a bit of an enigma because it is written in very highfalutin language, it’s written in jargon, it’s written using very very fancy words that are even sort of on the edge of the kind of level of words that I recognize.

It doesn’t go too far beyond that. You know, there weren’t any moments when I had to look up what a word meant –but I have a very high level of vocabulary because writing is literally my job and reading is my job, so I come into contact with a lot of words on a daily basis. The average layperson I think might actually struggle with this book and yet who is it for? Because this is a very casual kind of book. It’s a coffee table book so the kind of person that picks up a coffee table book about fashion I would think, and I’m saying this as someone who fits that description, is not the kind of person that is going to enjoy reading lengthy verbose words for the sake of it. It just obfuscates the meaning of the sentence.

I can feel myself doing it now, I’m using fancy words too and it’s irritating me because they’ve got into my system. There are so much simpler ways to say a lot of the things he says in this book and if he said them in a simpler way they would be more accessible to a wider range of people and that would make the book more of an interesting read, it would make it appeal to more people, ultimately it could lead to a lot more word-of-mouth sales and higher reviews. So that is what you want, you want those reviews, you want those sales.

Try using a type of language that has a broader appeal rather than trying to sound clever – because that’s how it comes across, is that you’re just trying to sound clever and that’s not attractive.

My second key takeaway from The Trench Book is about layout. Don’t interrupt text with text within a layout and this may be relevant if you’re doing non-fiction because you may end up designing or laying out your own book or you may end up hiring someone and then you need to approve their work and see whether they’ve done the job correctly.

Let me tell you the designer of this book did not meet the brief because you cannot have a sentence ending on one page in an article and then interrupted by several pages of slogans and text that have nothing to do with the article and then resume the article on a later page and if you think I’m joking, I’m really not. So this is an example and by the way this happens so many times throughout the book, I could have flipped to any random point and found one. So you can see here this ends halfway through a sentence, “proofed again when”, then on the very next page we have an illustration which by the way has a caption on the side so technically some text there, then we have a pull quote.

So now we’re going from halfway through a sentence to a pull quote which is completely different from the sentence, more pictures, more pictures including an advert which has text on it and finally we finish the sentence: “woven into a piece”. Can you remember what the first half of the sentence was? Because I’ve already forgotten. Don’t do that. Finish your sentence even if it means that you have to play around with the structure of the paragraph to fit it on that page, then put some other text in wherever you like, then go on to a new sentence.

Don’t put text graphic layouts between two halves of a sentence, that’s so painful to me.

The final key takeaway that I have from The Trench Book is also about layout and it’s about making sure that the images within your design are actually relevant to the part of the text they appear next to. So there are a lot of places in this book where you have a bunch of photographs of models or even celebrities wearing trench coats and they have absolutely nothing to do with the section that they are plonked down in.

A lot of them are stock photographs which is useless unless they are showing an exact style of coat – and if they are showing an exact style of coat that needs to be made clear in the caption, because a lot of the captions just say things like “model wearing trench coat” and you’re like yes, obviously, give me more information please. But there’s no point in having a whole section about royal families wearing trench coats and then instead of a picture of the royal family you actually have a picture of a Hollywood actor. That doesn’t make sense, it just doesn’t make sense.

Illustrations, photographs, images, whatever you’re going to put into your book as a graphic element needs to be relevant to the text otherwise it’s superfluous and you’ve spent money on a stock image that you probably had to buy that was wasted and on a page that you had to print that was wasted. So make sure that it’s all relevant, make sure that everything is in the right places, make sure it all lines up. It’s really easy to do this.

As I say, I’ve been an Editor-in-Chief for a long time and that’s kind of the whole thing. When you’re doing a magazine, layout is the whole thing. You have to make sure everything is relevant and that it flows and that things look good next to each other.

It’s not hard to do, it really actually isn’t. It’s definitely not hard to learn but it’s something that must be done. You can’t just put things in haphazardly, download a pack of let’s say a hundred stock images and then just use them all wherever you see fit because you’ve spent the money now anyway so you better use them.

Make them relevant, make them count and it’s going to be a lot more useful and valuable to the reader. Think about the value to readers always. Is this going to benefit my reader? If it isn’t, chuck it out of the layout.

So those are my three key takeaways from The Trench Book by Nick Foulkes. Very much a coffee table book, very much not going on my coffee table, just going to go and get hidden on a shelf because I don’t think it has any real appeal to anybody other than me, probably, because as I say I work in the world of fashion, probably no one else cares but it was £1 so I’m not going to complain too much.