How’s your elevator speech? Can you captivate an agent with your main character–between floors 2 and 11?
It’s not easy, but like so many presentational challenges, success starts with the quality of your own understanding. The more clearly etched that character is to YOU, the more your elevator speech will move a listener–and more important, the more appealing your story will be to your readers.
Here’s a test: how well do you think you know your main character? Pretty well? Can you capture his or her soul, in a single image–the visual equivalent of an elevator speech? You have ten seconds. Go…
How’d you do?
Actor Paul Giamatti stars in a new movie in which the Russian Mob extracts and trafficks his soul for profit. Talking about the idea to a New Yorker interviewer, Giamatti launched into a whimsical “souls-of-famous-people” game:
“I’d like to try Willie Nelson’s soul for a day,” he volunteered. “It would be like an ear of roasted corn. Merle Haggard’s—it’d be an engine block. Powerful, but kind of rusty, with lots of buildup. Freud would be interesting. I’m seeing a piece of Babylonian statuary, with the curly beard, the half-a-lion, the wings. Or Donald Trump: a nice set of whitewall tires. Kim Jong Il, a crazy box of crabs, and Henry Kissinger, a door knob.” And Giamatti’s own soul? “I’m seeing a hand-painted ceramic toad.”
Notice how Giamatti captures each real life character’s “soul” with cartoon-like incisiveness.
Actors are professional role players so they learn this skill early. By contrast, novelists, who actually create roles, don’t have to inhabit them, at least not in front of an audience, as actors do. No one’s watching, literally. Without the pressure of real-time scrutiny, the chances are the novelist may ease off before reaching the summit–absolute iconic character knowledge.
Too bad.
Think of the otherwise promising novels you tossed aside because the characters never clearly emerged, or the story just couldn’t seem to figure itself out. As my quotation-spouting old Grandma used to say, “Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.”
(That’s John Greenleaf Whittier, by they way, italics mine.)
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