In writing a book boredom is the first deadly sin.
To have any chance of getting a publisher to publish your book and then readers to read it, you have to have characters whose actions, words and reactions are interesting.
If you’re writing about something that happened to you in real life, don’t assume that because you think it’s interesting…. other people will think so also.
But what is an interesting character? Not just to you but to others?
In the broadest sense it would be perhaps a character facing challenges, danger, adversity, fear, a character who has to struggle against something, a villain, an unworthy lover, a disease or a science fiction monster there are a million possibilities.
….As long as you make it interesting.
But how interesting is interesting?
A publisher will select your book to publish (not a self-publish where you simply pay someone to print your book it used to be called a vanity publish. I’ll talk about that in a different column).
I’m talking about a real publishing deal where a publisher offers to publish your book for free at no charge to you in the hopes of selling it. A publisher will choose your book if the characters in it are compelling.
That means that the publisher decides the characters are interesting enough that the readers will also find it interesting and most importantly….will come to in some way identify personally with the struggles of the characters.
This is not an easy feat to achieve.
Let me give an example of my own.
I wrote a novel titled “The Red Terror” that both succeeded and failed. A story about a caveman in Stone Age Britain 130,000 years ago, the book portrayed what I believe to be historically accurately, the grim reality of living in that time and place.
I got a nasty book review from a reader who called himself “Heel Clicker.” He said in his review, “You don’t get attached to the characters so I don’t care when someone dies, and hunting missions are not interesting because a bunch of people are always being killed with no remorse or feeling.”
This is not about bad reviews I’ll talk about those later too (by the way a majority of readers 65 percent gave the book a four or five-star rating so evidently they felt the story was compelling).
At least in this case I’ll call him “Heel.” He couldn’t personally identify with the characters.
No argument from me I don’t argue with bad reviews.
But I could have said, “Look Heel, do you have any idea how grim life in the Stone Age was? Life expectancy was 20 years (that’s if you survived childhood with a high mortality rate if you did survive childhood some adults lived as long as 70 years).
But life then was brutal.
There were no pain pills. If you had a toothache I suppose you tied a vine to the bad tooth, then tied it to a tree, and ran away for 20 steps pulling and yanking the tooth out. Among cave dwellers death was a constant occurrence. Its frequency must have muted their grief.
Life was a never-ending continuing struggle for food for enough to eat. Hunting giant wooly mammoths the ancestors of today’s elephants as portrayed on the book’s cover by cavemen with spears was a rare event. Most cave people were hunter-gatherers and got their food by picking it off the ground or from bushes and trees, eating grains, berries, seeds and fruit. Large game animals were dangerous and hard to bring down. Because they did not consume sugar or processed foods like we do today, the teeth of cave people were incredibly strong and cavity-free.
Heel didn’t like the book because the characters in it were not more like Heel—a modern man. Thus, if I had made the story less historically accurate if I had made the lead character more like Heel, he might have given me a better review.
Had I known I could have named the lead caveman “Heel.”
The point here is that you have to find a way to make characters a reader can identify with, sympathize with, or even come to hate, as long as it provokes some kind of shared emotional response.
More on this next week……….
John Sammon is a freelance writer and the author of 41 books, many of which can be foundhere on Amazon. He is a resident of El Dorado Hills. This commentary is part of a series on the journey of self publishing.
