Ten Steps to an Emotionally Engaging Character

Literary agents pass on submissions for all sorts of reasons. For me, it usually comes down to the writing, more specifically, the characters themselves and how well I am able to connect with them. Having that emotional engagement with the characters makes me care what happens to them and keeps me turning pages.

The most common reason why I cannot connect with a protagonist is because the character does not seem “real” enough for me to relate to him or her. In other words, the character must have a certain degree of complexity, and a deeper or more layered way of thinking and acting to comes off as authentic and unique. Otherwise, the character will appear shallow and one-dimensional. He or she will seem more like a stock character pulled out of a TV show or movie, or worse, a caricature of a person.

The key to creating a more complex and convincing protagonist is to understand your character on an intimate level. Below is a 10-step writing exercise designed to help you dive deeper into the inner workings of your character’s personality:

Step 1: Create a tagline for the character. This is similar to what you would see in a personal profile of someone on social media. Just like a social media profile, it should be relatively short, reveal a main aspect of the character and her interests or what she desires most or aspires to become. 

Step 2: Write up a personal history of the character. Start with the basics and leave room to add more as more about the character comes to you. A good place to begin is with the character’s family history, including cultural and social roots. Then expand further. Are there any family issues or secrets? What about significant or pivotal childhood events? Think of what events or relationships might’ve influenced or shaped the character’s decisions in the story – perhaps an alcoholic or abusive parent, or a sibling that drowned or was murdered.

Step 3: Identify in general terms, your character’s type. Think in categories, archetypes, and even in stereotypes. Commercial fiction will often require a character to fill a role that fits a category – like the nosy mother-in-law or the funny, buddy sidekick or the recovering alcoholic detective. Once you have a generalized aspect of your character, make him or her more interesting and unique by adding traits and behaviors that might emphasize, stretch, bend or go against type.

Step 4: Describe the character’s morality make-up. Is the character principled or is he untrustworthy?  Is she thoughtful and logical about her decisions or impulsive and irrational? Is he empathetic and kind or indifferent and cruel to others? Is he honest to fault? Or perhaps ruthless and ambitious? Or maybe ethical and heroic?

Step 5: List what your character’s dreams and aspirations are.  Include not just career or life goals. Also include personal goals. For example, you might have a character who wants to stop a terrorist plot but he also wants to some day make amends with his estranged brother.

Step 6: Describe difficulties in the character’s life. What inner demons are making him or her struggle to get though the day, or deal with others? These difficulties might manifest themselves in the character’s life by making him drink too much or make her unable to commit to a relationship or contribute to his depression.  

Step 7: List the strengths and weaknesses of the character. What skills does she utilize the best or what traits help her the most?  What are the weaknesses or deficiencies in skills or behavior that come out most often or at the worst moments?

Step 8:Write about an incident, relationship or anything from the character’s upbringing that either directly or indirectly creates a behavioral or personality issue for him or her now, such as a debilitating shyness as a result of being shamed or dismissed as a child, or an underlying anger because of being abandoned by a father.

Step 9: Identify the cultural or environmental elements that might influence your character.  What ethnic or cultural traditions does he practice? What kind of sports does she play or watch? What television shows are on his DVR? Does she prefer to be in nature or the city? Is he conservative or liberal? Does she go to ballets and symphonies or rock concerts and baseball games? 

  

Step 10:After you have completed the nine steps, take stock of what you’ve written down. You should now have a better, more nuanced vision of your character. Continue to add to what you have written about your character, as you work on your story. Your notes will help you make decisions in what your character will do or think when situations arise in the story, identify the character’s personal stakes and bring out your character’s arc.

By the end of this exercise, you will know your character on a more meaningful level.  He will have a broader range of actions and reactions, because you will have a better understanding of his beliefs and morality, and his personality flaws and strengths. Your character will have a compelling inner life with tangible fears and real aspirations. He’ll have interesting quirks and eccentricities. Most of all, you’ll have a more emotionally engaging story that will keep readers invested in seeing your character’s journey to the end.

One Literary Agent’s Perspective on Twitter Pitch Parties

I must seem like a glutton for punishment. I participated in the last three Twitter pitch parties (#kidpit, #pitmad and #sffpit) and I’m gearing up for the one (#writepit) coming up this Friday. As a newer agent, you might wonder why I’ve chosen this route to find authors rather than being open to unsolicited submissions. Part of my reasoning comes from being a slush pile reader. In the year and a half I waded through hundreds, if not thousands, of submissions, I can count on one hand how many book projects I recommended to agents. In the last two months, after participating in the last three pitch parties, I have already found a couple of talented authors with interesting book projects I want to represent.

Twitter pitch parties have proven more effective, because they help match up an agent’s taste to an author’s book. I’m more likely favorite a tweet if the pitch resonates with me. They are also a better way of targeting the kinds of projects what we’d like to represent. For example. while several agents at Kimberley Cameron & Associates represent science fiction/fantasy, our individual preferences within that genre vary widely. One of my colleagues might be looking for a high fantasy or a space opera, while another might prefer an urban fantasy or a cyberpunk adventure.

There are excellent articles online about how to pitch on Twitter pitch parties. One of them from our own Relentless Writer, Janet Wren. My intent is not to rehash that information but instead offer suggestions from an agent’s perspective. And I fully admit these suggestions are influenced by my personal preferences:

• Your pitch needs to have a strong hook. It should pull us in and make us interested in reading more. It should not, however, be a summary of the story or the plot. It should contain tantalizing details that reveal story or plot, but that’s not the focus. The focus is to make us stop scrolling and take notice.
• Show the main character’s personal stakes. Personal stakes help create that emotional connection with your story. 
• Include the external conflict without eclipsing the personal stakes. It should, in fact, heighten the personal stakes.

I favorited James Matlack Raney's Twitter pitches, because they employ these three ideas very effectively:

When an army of wolves descends upon the GrayWoods, a lame runt must rise above his place and lead his siblings to sanctuary #MG #Kidpit 

Wolves. Magic. An army bent on revenge. A lame runt and his family must risk everything to survive. The Lord of the Wolves. #Pitmad #MG 

--James Matlack Raney (@JMRaneyWriter)

• Avoid being vague or abstract. The principles of craft still apply, even in pitches, and specificity is always more effective. Like James Matlack Raney’s pitches, limit the amount of detail and use targeted detail that raises questions. 
• Be careful not to use overused phrases, clichés or generalizations. For example, a pitch that reads: “She had to face the darkness in her soul” won’t entice me to request a submission. It also makes me suspect that’s this is the kind of writing I’d find in the novel, which I wouldn’t be interested in reading.
• Just like in your stories, be careful with using questions to create artificial suspense. Pitches like, “What do you do if your marriage was a lie?” are much less effective than using short declarative sentences with tantalizing details.
• Differ your pitches in more ways than just switching around a word or two. Vary the two tweets allowed per hour to reveal more about the story, although each must stand on its own. I can't speak for other agents or editors, but I’ll check the author’s feed to read all of his or her pitches. For example, the reason why I requested a submission from Michelle Barry isn’t because of just one of her tweets. It was actually the culmination of her tweets that made me favorite one:

Flowers have been extinct on the moon since the Old World collapsed, until Myra reawakens their magic #KidPit MG Secret Garden Retelling

When Myra unlocks a lab full of forbidden flowers she also releases a secret magic within her. #KidPit MG SF/F The Secret Garden retelling

--Michelle Barry (@MichelleABarry)

• This brings me to my next suggestion, which some authors may not agree with: Don’t retweet so much during the pitch period. I understand you want to support your fellow authors, and there is nothing wrong about tweeting your friends’ pitches or pitches that you find interesting. But when you flood your feed with retweets of others’ pitches, you can actually end up obscuring your own pitches from agents who might be checking out your feed for the other pitches you tweeted.
• Make sure you tweet more than once or twice during the 12-hour pitch party. Most authors have no problem taking advantage of two pitches per hour, but a small number only tweet one or two pitches the entire day. These pitches are often missed because they're sandwiched between thousands of repeating tweets (#Pitmad had almost 50,000 tweets!). 

Lastly, my last two suggestions are more requests:

• Unless you are pitching a picture book, do not include illustrations, pictures, gifs, video, etc. of what you envision for the book cover, characters, world, etc. Better to leave that to our imagination. Your words have a more powerful impact. (Also, my eyes are looking for words not pictures, and since spam tweets usually include some image or graphic, I'll scroll past without thinking, much less reading.)
• Do not pitch or promote your self-published book. First of all, it's fruitless to pitch, because agents and editors simply won't consider the book. Second, such tweets clogs up the feed and obscure the pitches by unpublished authors who are seriously looking for representation.

As you work and rework your pitches, keep these suggestions in mind. Your work will not go unnoticed and eventually you'll start getting stars from more agents and editors. If not at first, just keep at it; keep honing your pitches. All your efforts, no matter how big or small, will bring you even closer to finding a home for your book.