Three Ways to Develop a Sympathetic Main Character

Agents handing out rejections have been known to observe that they "didn't connect" with a novel's main character. If you attend writers conferences, you're bound to hear variations on this theme. Especially in children's lit, agents tend to be looking for "character driven" stories.  They're looking to sympathize and identify. They want to "fall in love."

So how to create main characters readers will love? My SCBWI writers group got into this topic recently when someone observed that when you've done your job with a character, really done your job, you'll feel "emotionally exhausted" after a writing session.


Digging Down Deep
That observation really hit home.

How To Write A Killer Ending, Part 2

Yesterday we were thinking about what makes a great fictional ending--a final line worthy of the 300-odd pages you've put into reading a novel. I chose (at random) two unlikely candidates:

#1"We lived happily ever after," (from A Year Down Yonder); and
#2 "Over in England they married and lived happily ever after." (from Loving, by Henry Green)

No Fariy Tale Ending
No serious writer could end a book this way without tongue firmly implanted in cheek, and Green's choice of an ending is made even twistier because as a writer, he's obsessed with the concrete, the close observation of life as it's really lived. Loving is about as far away from fairy tale as it's possible to get. It's set during WWII, and it concerns the downstairs shenanigans of butlers, maids, and cooks in an Irish castle: hilarious, a little raunchy, dialogue-based, full of psychological depth. By the time you get to the end of Loving you could practically finish sentences for his cast, you know them so well.

So to end this book with "happily ever after" conveys a kind of writerly exhaustion.

Four Must-Read Writing Books

I feel like I've read 150 books on the craft of writing this year; in my nightmares I'm stumbling through a Dickensian fog of them, pages piling around me in drifts. All offer useful tips and tricks -- never do I close the book (or hurl it across the room, or weep over its pages) without at least a few takeaways. But a handful  stand out as books that have changed the way I see the world; they're books that have sent me back for my 5th-plus revision on my work-in-progress with joy in my heart rather than dread. On occasion they speak to something that I feel I knew deeply all along but failed to recognize consciously until that "ah-ha" moment on page, say, 57. And the really great ones have lifted me, have made me feel I'm capable of more than I rightly ought to be. Here they are, in no particular order: