I was reading Writer Unboxed (a favorite pastime) and Kristan Hoffman was passing along tips from a writers’ conference (and about navigating such a conference). One thing in particular caught my eye:
- Diagram the relationships between your characters. The more connections between them, the more interesting it will be. (“It’s supposed to be messy!”) — Julia Vee
Along with it was this accompanying examples:
That immediately got me diagramming how my characters in my novels relate. The image on the left, as I would read it, is not that all the supporting characters simply relate to the main character (not just boring, but unlikely), but that they only relate to each other via the main character and their relationship to that person. That would be boring. I thought it was an interesting – and valuable exercise – so thought I would pass it along.
One other tip that stood out to me was:
Even with a bad pitch, you might still get your sample pages read — but a good pitch can get an agent excited, and that’s a whole different mindset. — Mary C. Moore
I’ve ended up doing a lot of interviewing of candidates for jobs along the way and always recall reading that one subconsciously makes a decision in the first few minutes and (unless one is very alert to it) the rest is confirmation bias – subconsciously looking for things to confirm that positive or negative first impression (which can lead to bad decision making). But essentially that’s sort of what Moore is referring to: a good pitch can lead to a positive trending confirmation bias.
Ramblings 