Tag: heart

The Love of a Writer

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Love amazes me, more often this time of year than any other. The love that drives an exhausted parent to endure the bright plastic torture of Toy R Us. The love that keeps a smile on the face of a Salvation Army bell ringer long after most of us would have left that bucket to fend for itself. The love that makes us tear up when the season brings back a stray memory of someone once dear to us. Love of family, love of friends, love of faith. One of the most striking things about fiction is how it can trigger love in us for people who aren’t even real. But I think it goes further than that: without the capacity for love, we wouldn’t have fiction writing. Fiction is the art of human empathy.

How many of us have been so worried about a character that we couldn’t bear to stop reading well past a sane bedtime? Literary or genre fiction, for adults or children, it doesn’t matter: if the character is well crafted, we care. The third and fourth Harry Potter books kept me up for a week. I’m still worried about Theo in Goldfinch. When distressed about the plight of overworked horses in England, Anna Sewell turned a horse into a distinctive character and engaged the sympathies of a nation. After all these years, I can’t get through a single chapter of Black Beauty without choking up.

Love happens with a character similar to how it happens in life. We as readers have to meet someone very specific and real. Not perfect. We need to perceive that he or she faces challenges, just as we face challenges. We need to see attributes that we can relate to, such as humor, self-deprecation, courage, vulnerability, determination. We need to feel that the character truly wants something to stir our wanting it for him or her. The problems need to be big enough to engage our sympathies and interest. And there need to be details – lots of telling details – to conquer disbelief and break down our defenses.

But the key is that love must happen first with the writer. We as writers need to believe in our characters and be fully engaged with their struggles. We need their reality to break down our own defenses as well. I finally fell in love with my newest protagonist a few weeks ago, after months of fine tuning her voice, delving her history, and reimaging her story. Before that, I had an unusual character who interested me, the beginnings of a voice, an original premise, problems that I wasn’t yet sure how to solve . . . but I wasn’t carrying the character in my heart. I had to keep asking her questions. Why do you care so much? What are you afraid of? Why does that hurt? What do you hope for? I had to discover her past to care about her present, even if not all of it would appear in the book.

Loving your characters doesn’t mean you should shield them. It means you should trust them, and trust yourself. You need to throw life at them, be hard on them, push them farther out to sea. Force them to become more than they were. Love means you care about them despite their foibles, but it also means you need to respect their right to make mistakes and grow. The love of a true friend or wise parent, or maybe we need to create a new category: the love of a writer.

At heart, isn’t that why we do this? For love. It’s the only way this crazy business makes sense. To share with others the stories of people whom we can only imagine, and yet believe are worthy of real empathy and understanding. Worthy of love.



Pitch with Irony and Heart

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Writers are all about finding the right words, but many have trouble when it comes to pitching their novel to others. They may have heard that they’re supposed to have a logline with a hook, but what does that really mean? Is it something that only applies to screenwriting, or to genre and literary fiction as well? Is there a way to do this that doesn’t end up sounding so superficial, it’s painful to say?

Nothing can eliminate all the angst and awkwardness here, but I’d like to offer a few suggestions that may help.

Irony is key to a good hook. Agents, editors and prospective readers have busy lives and lots of choices about what to read, so the goal of a pitch is to be compelling and succinct. A “logline” refers to a one-sentence description of plot, with a “hook” to catch people’s attention. The concept comes out of Hollywood, but it can be adapted to form the base of your pitch. Fortunately for us non-Hollywood writers, that doesn’t mean you need special effects. What we’re really talking about is irony. The way your protagonist expects to face one thing, but it’s actually something much different (and bigger). Or the way your protagonist starts out in resistance to the goals of the plot. Irony hooks your audience by setting them up for more conflict and complication to come. They want to read on to see how it resolves. As long as you’re not in Hollywood, don’t be concerned if this takes you a couple of sentences rather than one.

The truth driving your book gives it heart. As I discussed in my post on The Truth Behind Fiction, your own truth underlies your writing even if you don’t always realize it. We’re drawn to a particular character or sequence of events because they connect with something about life that we long to express. Ask yourself, what is it about this that matters so much to me? What is it that I most want these characters, and my readers, to hear? The deepest, most resonant truth of your novel should be part of your pitch. (See The Truth Behind Fiction for examples.)

A well-written pitch matters. Your pitch is the first evidence that you can write, so do yourself justice. Good writing includes deft word choice and appealing cadence. Active verbs help to convey that things happen in your book. You also want to be true to your work. If your pitch exaggerates your plot beyond recognition, you won’t be doing yourself any favors. You need to find the right balance between catchy and accurate. It can be easy to get carried away. Lastly, you should try to make it natural to say. For this, I recommend practicing different versions out loud with family and friends. Even if your pitch will usually be in writing, it’s important to be able to say it to others without being self-conscious.

In the end, your pitch should feel like a concentrated outward projection of your novel, true to its plot line, steeped in its irony, imbued with its depth.