Querying for Emotion

Querying an agent? Make her swoon.

We talked yesterday about how to forge an emotional connection between yourself and your concept question as a way to make your writing more powerful and true.

But there's another sort of emotional connection we'll have to make when our novels are finished--the connection between our query and our dream agent.

Over on her kidlit blog, Mary Kole put this clearly. She says she wants a query to make her care. Well and good. But she's talking about more than showing high stakes and conflict, or teasers about the troubled backstory of our MCs. What Kole is asking for is a gripping, powerful emotional connection that occurs through a finely wrought combination of language and storytelling.

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.