Archive for June 22nd, 2009

Jun 22 2009

Please Don’t Spend a Publisher’s Time on Irrelevant Character Details

When you’re making a pitch to publishers, demographic details like these tend to be irrelevant.

  • Hair color
  • Eye color
  • Height
  • Weight
  • Nationalities. Okay, this could be useful, particularly to point out an unexpected setting, but generally I wouldn’t recommend mentioning this unless it’s hard to understand the plot without knowing who’s Canadian and who’s Russian.  Rule of thumb: If you’re pointing out nationalities mainly so that we know how diverse your superhero team is, it probably doesn’t matter.
  • Birthplace–unless, say, we need to know that a character is from another town, country or planet.
  • Educational background–unless it is relevant to the plot and/or suggests an important trait or skill.  (For non-students, the character’s job usually covers this better, however).
  • Blood type (Japanese publishers may care; Western ones definitely do not).
  • Horoscopes
  • Birthday

However, some demographic information is relevant because it affects the book’s audience appeal and how the book will be marketed.

  • Age–particularly if the character is roughly as old as the target audience.
  • Race–if the protagonist’s race is part of the audience appeal and/or is plot-relevant.
  • Gender–usually relevant (on at least the grounds of audience appeal) but you don’t need to explicitly tell us who’s a lady and who’s a guy.  You can cover that with gendered pronouns (e.g. he vs. she) and the names are usually a big clue, too.
  • Anything else that is particularly important to the plot.  Some examples may include jobs, species (for nonhuman characters), major illnesses, mental disorders, etc.
  • Anything that affects major character decisions or goals.  E.g. if the character’s main goal is to get over some past trauma, it might be worthwhile to briefly mention the trauma.  (If I were doing a synopsis of Scott Pilgrim, I’d probably mention that the main character is trying to get over a crushing breakup by dating a high schooler).

Obviously, these are just guidelines.  If the character’s height or weight or eye color are particularly important to the plot and/or provide a major obstacle, then mention them. However, in most cases, they are not.

 

 

Many beginning authors start out by doing lists of their characters’ demographic traits.  If that information is for your eyes only, I don’t think it’s an issue.  However, when you’re presenting your book to professionals, I would recommend a smoother approach that spends less time on extraneous details and more time on why your characters matter to the plot.   A particular detail might be relevant for some characters but not all characters.  For example, if one of your characters is an alien or elf, it’d probably be worthwhile to mention that (assuming it’s plot-relevant), but you probably don’t need to explicitly tell us which characters are humans because we can infer/assume that on our own.

 

 

Good luck!

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