Brad Johnson is an author and blogger who helps writers discover their niche, build successful habits, and quit their 9-5. His books include Ignite Your Beacon, Writing Clout and Tomes Of A Healing Heart. For strategic content and practical tips on how to become a full-time writer, visit: BradleyJohnsonProductions.com.
Most writers realize it can take many hours (even months or years!) to polish and perfect their poetry, short stories, or book. But when it’s time to submit this carefully created work to literary editors or agents, these same writers often make the mistake of spending hardly any time finding the best markets, or of making their submissions in random fits and spurts. Well, here’s a wake-up call, writers: It takes more than great writing to get published! You also need a smart writing submission strategy. At Writer’s Relief, we’ve been helping writers make effective submissions for over twenty-five years, and today we’re sharing our proven tips and advice.
Here are some of the most common submission strategy problems—and the fixes that work.
How To Get Published By Fixing Your Submission Strategy
Problem: You’re sending out lots of submissions but haven’t had any luck.
Try this: Be sure you’re submitting to the right markets. How do you do this? Research, research, research! This is especially important if your writing is a bit unique in voice, style, or content.
There can be hundreds (even thousands) of potential markets for your work. You need to thoroughly review genres and submission guidelines. Along with determining which markets are the best places for your work, it’s just as important that you eliminate the literary journals or agents that are NOT right for your work.
If you simply send work to any and every market without taking the time to do the research, you’ll be guilty of “submission spam”—sending a romance to a horror market, poetry to a short story venue, a 6,000-word essay to a journal that requests 3,000 words max, etc. This is a big publishing industry no-no! Being a submission spammer is the fastest way to get your work rejected—and to get a bad reputation among editors and literary agents.
At Writer’s Relief, we are constantly researching and updating our information on the thousands of markets we follow so we can accurately pinpoint the best markets for our clients’ work and get results. We follow ethical writing submission practices and never promote submission spam.
Problem: You send out one or two submissions, then wait months for a response.
Try this: Send out more submissions on a regular schedule.Getting an acceptance is a numbers game. In this very competitive publishing industry, even with strong work being submitted to well-targeted markets, it can take 100 submissions to get a true assessment of the response to your work. So we recommend sending work to 25 – 30 carefully selected markets every two months. As the saying goes: Lather, rinse, repeat!
When you’re submitting work on a consistent schedule to multiple markets, two things happen. One: You’ve immediately boosted your odds of getting an acceptance faster, because your work is getting into the hands of more literary editors and agents. Two: You’ve taken the bite out of rejection. Maybe a few markets have said no thanks, but there are plenty more out there that may say yes! So there’s no need to get down in the dumps over one rejection when there are still plenty of fish in the sea. Speaking of rejection…
Problem: Your submission strategy is nonexistent, because you are paralyzed by the fear of rejection.
Try this: We know it seems daunting, but take a deep breath…and send out submissions anyway. Rejection is common for EVERY writer who submits work. As writers ourselves, we know it’s not the best feeling—but we’re also here to tell you that a rejection letter doesn’t mean your writing isn’t any good! Sometimes work is rejected simply because the literary journal or agent has just accepted a piece similar to yours. Think about the author of your favorite book, short story, poem, or essay…odds are, that writer’s work was rejected at some point. If they can survive rejection and go on to get an acceptance, so can you.
Here’s an insider tip from us to you:A rejection letter can actually be a good thing! In a business where many rejections are form letters, a personalized response—even if it’s a nice no thank you—shows that an agent or editor was interested enough in your work to personally reach out to you. And getting a rejection letter also means that you’re being brave and putting yourself out there. So instead of letting rejection stop you, use it as fuel to keep going.
Problem: You don’t have time to research and make submissions (and would rather be writing anyway).
Try this: Reach out for help! Life gets busy. If you don’t have hours available for researching and choosing markets, and then more time to spend making submissions, you can ask friends and family for assistance. Or better yet, contact a submission service like Writer’s Relief to research and target the best possible markets for you! Our proven submission strategy works: As of this article’s writing, we’ve helped our clients get over 20,000 acceptances since 1994.
And try this: Submit your work to our Review Board today! Right now, the Writer’s Relief Review Board is reading for new clients in the genres of poetry, short stories, essays, and novels/memoirs. If you’re ready to fix what’s broken in your current submission strategy, send in your work today and find out how we can help!
We are reading for new clients in the following genres:
Novels and memoirs
Poetry
Short creative prose
Submitting work to our Review Board is free, confidential, and incurs no obligations. If your submission strategy could use some first aid, STAT, send your writing for consideration today!
Question: What is the biggest hurdle you face with your submission strategy?
Readers love great characters. Think back to your favorite stories of all time. You might remember the story points, or you might not. You might remember the best bits of dialogue, or you might not. You might remember the setting descriptions, but let’s be honest, you probably don’t.
But the characters? You’ll remember the characters for the rest of your life.
How do you do that? How do you create great characters? The short answer is character development, but what is character development and how can you use it to create characters readers love?
That’s what we’re going to talk about in this article.
Ready to get started with this characterization lesson? Let’s do it.
What Is Character Development?
Character development is the process of creating a character and then throwing them into a story so that they evolve and display their full personality.
Note that one of the first things I mentioned above is to throw your character into the story.
Some writers spend months or years building a character, figuring out their every personality trait, filling out long surveys about their favorite foods and what kinds of clothes they love to wear.
They spend so much time on characterization, they never write their book! And if they try, they can’t figure out why their character doesn’t feel like the ones in their favorite novels.
That kind of characterization is fun, but it can easily veer into navel-gazing.
Instead, put your characters to the test.
The best form of character development is the following:
One of the best tools for character development is a character sketch, or character profile. This is where you record details about a character to better understand them.
You can mix and match elements to create your own character sketch template, but here’s what a character sketch might contain:
Character name
Photo (I just find something on Google image search to serve as a likeness)
Character type (see 8 types below)
One sentence summary
One paragraph description (including a physical description, occupation, flaws, good attributes, and mannerisms)
Goals (what do they want)
Conflicts (what keeps them from getting what they want)
Narrative (what do they do in the story)
Remember, the best way to do character development is to throw characters into a story. Don’t sketch characters for their own sake, but to find where they fit into the story.
8 Types of Characters
This is obvious, but most stories contain many types of characters, not just one. Below, I’ve listed the eight types of characters.
When you’re creating your character sketches, write what type of character they are beside their sketch.
The Protagonist. The protagonist is the character at the center of the plot whose choices drive the story and whose fate determine the story’s outcome.
Point of View Characters. Some stories have multiple central characters, e.g. Game of Thrones. The term for a central character when there are multiple ones is a Point of View character. These characters carry the narrative, and in a story told in third person limited point of view they will be the only character whose thoughts and emotions the reader can see.
The Villain. Not every story has a villain, but for the ones that do, the villain is the chief source of conflict. Also known as the antagonist.
The Mentor. The mentor is a character who steers the protagonist, helps get them out of trouble, and provides chances for reflection. A mainstay of the hero’s journeyplot structure, in many types of stories, without a good mentor, the character’s journey will end in tragedy (e.g. think about Hamlet, who had no mentor).
The Sidekick. A sidekick is a character who supports the protagonist. Besides the protagonist and villain, they have the most opportunity for characterization, and provide dialogue opportunities and an insight into the character’s mindset. Sidekicks appear in all genres, from romance (e.g. Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet) to adventure (e.g. Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings) to mystery (e.g. Inspector Beauvoir from the Inspector Gamache series) and more.
Side Characters. Side characters often have fully developed personalities, long interactions with the protagonist, and perhaps even deep backstories. However, they rarely make decisions or change throughout the story.
The Chorus. A term from playwriting, these side characters may have names and vague descriptions, but they do not have fully developed personalities and are chiefly there to serve as bystanders.
Suspects. Specific to mysteries and thrillers, suspects have fully developed personalities and they serve as objects of exploration for the investigator. They should all have motives and appear at least somewhat guilty of the crime, if only to serve as red herrings.
On my podcast, Character Test, my cohost and I have found that there are four criteria that you can use to evaluate a character, to test and see whether a character is good or not.
Here, I’m not talking about whether they are morally good, but whether they are interesting, relatable, entertaining, and worth following. In other words, this is about figuring out will readers love them.
Also, this is what makes a good character. If you want to know how to make a good character, scroll down to the Character Development Steps section.
1. Good Characters Have Goals
Good stories are about characters who want something and experience challenges to get what they want.
Desire is central to good stories, good characters, and to the human condition itself. Good characters have deeply held desires and are willing to make sacrifices to achieve those desires.
That being said, those desires don’t have to start out as anything big.
As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Make your characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
“Make your characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.” —Kurt Vonnegut
As nice as it would be for your character to get everything they wanted without having to do any work, it would make for a very boring story!
I like what bestselling author Kristina McMorris told me: “I only give my characters a happy ending if they’ve worked really hard for it.” Kristina’s novel Sold on a Monday was on the New York Times bestsellers list for twenty straight weeks, so she knows what she’s talking about!
3. Good Characters Make Decisions
Good characters take control of their own fate. They take action. They make choices, and they suffer the good or bad consequences of those choices.
Bad characters let life happen to them. Bad characters allow others to make choices for them. They never take action in their own lives, and it’s their lack of decision-making ability that makes them boring.
I made this word up but I think it’s going to stick!
Editorial note from Alice: Stop trying to make “empathizable” happen, Joe. It’s not going to happen.
You can empathize with good characters. Even if they are villains (especially if they’re villains), you can understand where they’re coming from, and maybe even relate.
Good characters, in other words, are human.
Bad characters are so foreign or perfect or evil that you can’t relate to where they’re coming from.
Bonus: Good Characters Change
Many will argue with this, but not all good characters change. In fact, you can tell a great story where the protagonist doesn’t change.
Take James Bond. In a few novels and films he changes (e.g. Casino Royale) but in most, James stays the same stoic, cocky person he started out as. And the novels are still great!
Or Inspector Gamache, my favorite detective from the series by Louise Penny. Inspector Gamache starts out as the perfect gentleman, thoughtful leader, and unerring investigator and ends each novel the same way. There are a few individual books where he goes through deep inner turmoil, but even then he re-emerges the same, amazing person, just a little bit stronger and surer in his ways.
There are many great stories where the character changes. It’s especially a hallmark of the hero’s journey (which is itself a form of character development). But it’s not always a requirement of a good character.
Character Development Steps
Now that we’ve talked about what makes a good character, how do you actually develop a character readers love? The answer is that you lead them through a good story.
You might think that you, the author, creates a good character. And to some extent that’s true. But the story tests the character, forces them to reveal the deepest, darkest, best, and most intimate aspects of their character.
Without a great story there would be no reason to get to know your characters.
Even more, from a writing perspective, it’s the storytelling process where we first discover who these characters we’ve made are. It’s by putting them through conflict, giving them difficult choices, and seeing how they solve those problems that we see what our characters are actually made of.
That means you can’t start this process soon enough.
Instead of spending all your time dreaming up individual traits of your characters, throw them into the story and see what happens. That is how you will get to know them.
One quick note: I’m indebted to Shawn Coyne and Story Grid for much of my thinking of each of these five steps. To learn more, visit Shawn’s guide, Storytelling’s Five Commandments.
1. Desire. Find something your character wants right away.
What are your character’s goals? What does he or she want?
There are two types of desires: felt needs and deep-seated desires.
If you’re like most people your character will want many things. At the same time, they probably want one or two things that are deeply held, maybe even subconscious.
For example, a character might say she wants an outfit so she can be cool. That would be an example of a felt need. But in reality, whether she’s willing to admit it to anyone or not, she might want a family, since her parents were killed in a car crash. That’s a deep-seated desire.
Often a scene, chapter, or even book will begin with a felt need, but then center on the deep-seated desire in the middle and climax of the story.
In my memoir,Crowdsourcing Paris, I began with a felt need to go to Paris, but the book centers on my deep-seated desire for authenticity and self-acceptance.
What does your character want?
2. Conflict. Make it hard for them to get what they want.
The established storytelling advice is appropriate here: “In the first act, put your character up a tree. In the second act, throw rocks at them; in the third act, bring them down.”
To take the analogy further, it’s their desires and goals that put the character up a tree. It’s the conflict you create, perhaps through an antagonist, that functions as the rocks.
What obstacles do you need to put in front of your character to keep them from getting what they want?
And what lengths is your character willing to go to get what they want?
These challenges build and build until finally, the character has to do something. They have to choose.
3. Dilemma. Setup a difficult choice, a dilemma, for your character.
Choice is the heart of character development. THIS is the real test of our character, and the moment where we see their true self.
Shawn Coyne says there should be a crisis, or a dilemma, in every scene. That’s a lot of choices for your character! But it’s brilliant, because their dilemma is both what drives the drama of the story as a whole and also what
The choice must be difficult. This isn’t a choice between whether your character wants pizza or hamburgers for dinner.
Instead, the dilemma is between two very good things—for example, love or money—or two very bad things—would you rather be struck blind and never get to see the love of your life again, or have the love of your life maimed before your eyes.
In Crowdsourcing Paris, I faced the difficult choice between whether to do a series of very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and, in the end, life-threatening adventures; or give back the $4,300 my audience had given me to complete the adventures and notgo to Paris. Tough choice!
The climax of every scene, act, and book as a whole is when the character who has been faced with a dilemma finally makes the choice and takes action.
Yes, that’s right. Your character has to take action.
A character who passively allows situations to carry him or her through the chaos of life doesn’t make for a good character.
No, your character must choose and take action on that choice.
This is where your character shows who he or she is, which also means this is the best example of show don’t tell.
5. Change. How is the character’s life different now?
Now that your character has made a choice, how is their life different? What has changed? Are things better? Or are things worse?
Resolve the tension you’ve built and show the change.
Those are the five steps of character development. Note that if an average novel is fifty to seventy scenes, that gives you a lot of opportunities to develop your character!
However, that’s also the point, because character isn’t revealed all at once, but slowly, challenge after challenge, choice after choice.
Character Development Tips and Tricks
The five character development steps above show you how to reveal your character through story, but over the centuries, writers have figured out a few shortcuts to help us create even better characters.
Here are a few character development tips and tricks. Check back for more as we update this list!
1. Flaws
Every good character is broken in some way. Why? Because every person is broken in some way, and it’s our flaws that make us human and relatable (maybe even empathizable!).
As the saying goes, “Success builds walls. Failure builds bridges.”
What is wrong with your character? It might be deep-seated, like inherent selfishness (e.g. Han Solo), or it might be something simple, like they can’t help but spill food on themselves (e.g. Clara from Inspector Gamache).
2. Orphans
There are ten times more orphans per capita in literature than in the real world.
I made that statistic up, but think about it:
Luke from Star Wars
Harry Potter
Frodo from Lord of the Rings
Pip from Great Expectations (or pretty much every Charles Dickens hero)
Jane Eyre
Every superhero ever (Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Supergirl, all of them)
Kvothe from The Name of the Wind
At least half of all Disney characters (Bambi, Aladdin, Frozen, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella)
Anne of Green Gables
Any Roald Dahl protagonist
Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow (and pretty much every other character in Game of Thrones eventually)
Every one of these characters is an orphan. If you expand it to losing one parent, the list goes on even further.
Why do writers love orphans? For two reasons, I think: because they’re immediately empathizable and because they are the masters of their own fate (see step four above!).
3. Highlight Strong Appearance Traits
Whether it’s a very long nose (Pinnochio) or vast physical strength (Jean Valjean from Les Miserables), we often remember characters by one specific trait that they have.
When you’re describing your characters, don’t describe every aspect of their appearance. Choose one or two physical traits that are especially striking and focus on them. Your reader will fill in the rest with their imaginations.
4. Voice
Good characters have their own unique voice, their own unique way of talking.
Perhaps they speak with a Long Island accent with lots of slang, or maybe they insert profanity every other word. Whatever it is, find a few verbal ticks that your character has. Even better, keep track of them on your character sketch so you don’t forget!
Note: this is often one of the hardest parts of character building. George R.R. Martin talks about how he has to write several chapters from each of his point of view characters’ perspective before switching to a new character because it’s so difficult to transition into a different character’s voice.
5. Your Character’s Fate Is Often Determined by Their Mentor
For your protagonist, the mentor figure is often the most important character. In fact, the presence or lack of a mentor often determines their fate. A hero with a good mentor will often succeed, whereas a hero without a mentor or with a corrupt mentor will fail.
Choose your mentor carefully!
Character Development Writing Exercise
Now that you know everything about developing characters, let’s put your new knowledge to practice! Use the creative writing exercise below to practice developing a strong character.
Choose one of the character types above and spend five minutes sketching out their character using the character sketch template above (Character Name, type, one-sentence summary, goals, conflicts).
After your five minutes are up, write about your new character as he or she goes through a scene using the five character development steps: desire, conflict, dilemma, choice, and change. Write for ten minutes.
When your time is up, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, be sure to give feedback to at least three other writers.
Editor’s note: Are you a writer? Do you speak a second language? To make money translating other authors’ works (or your own), then, might be an unexpected income stream… Many writers focus solely on their own writing projects, honing their craft over the years and pursuing that goal of making a living from writing. Few […]
It’s a big question. “When should I invest in conversion optimization for my website?” Even though I’ve been preaching the benefits of CRO since 2006, I don’t consider it an obvious decision. Instead of telling you what I think, I asked a competitor to tell you, just to keep me honest. We have answered the […]
The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates.
A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.
A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.
An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how inaccurate open rates are.
The industry needs to stop obsessing over open rates.
As measured by senders, an open means a particular image was loaded. This sometimes corresponds with an email being opened and read by a user.
There are a number of ways open rates can be wrong, though.
I mean, I get it, I use opens are easy to measure and easy to use. They’re a start for looking at a number of things. But we have to remember the data is, at best, an approximation. There are lots of folks opening and reading messages that never load a pixel (hi! is me!). There are also some people who show as opening the mail but have never looked at it.
At Gmail someone can open a mail, and then immediately mark it as spam. As I said recently, in some cases an open can hurt your reputation. “If they opened it they’re engaged with the mail” has always been an assumption. It’s become part of the delivery
They’re a data point. They’re not the be all and the end all of data points. In order to effectively use them you need to understand what they mean and what they don’t mean. They’re inaccurate at best and can be very misleading if you’re not paying attention.
We need to stop spending so much time obsessing about open rates and more time worrying about how accurate our data collection processes are.
This is our 150th issue. Last year we celebrated Granta’s fortieth anniversary (in its current incarnation) by bringing out a special edition of some of the best fiction and non-fiction we have published over the years. Here, we celebrate language itself, publishing a range of authors who stretch writing to its creative limits. We take our theme from Pwaangulongii Dauod’s remarkable eulogy to the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. ‘There must be ways to organise the world with language,’ Dauod writes, meditating on the explosive creative energy of Wainaina’s vision for Africa. It’s an apt title, given that all the fiction in this issue is visionary and dramatic, addressing existential themes and taking the space to do it.
Our opening story, by Carmen Maria Machado, plays with ideas of staged violence, visibility and invisibility, origins and renewal, a ghostly mirroring of a fictional pre-war Parisian theatre of pain.
Sidik Fofana’s piece – a chapter from a forthcoming novel set in Harlem and written in American vernacular English – follows a schoolgirl sent South to stay with relatives over the summer. I’ve always been sceptical about writing in the vernacular, trapping characters in perceived idioms, but Fofana’s writing is so inventive, and so persuasive, that you immediately lose yourself in it.
Che Yeun’s story is about a South Korean teenager whose friendship with another girl culminates in violence. Can you survive outside the system? But then again, as a girl, can you survive within it?
Mazen Maarouf’s ‘The Story of Anya’ portrays a teenage boy falling in love with a girl in a nameless setting where some people have special powers and dreams are sold for money. Like Elena Ferrante, whose psychoanalytic insights and thoughts order the world of her characters, Maarouf drops clues into the text. The story is punctuated with symbols from faintly familiar yet surreal settings: bulletproof glass, cancer, nosebleeds, signed bank notes.
After youth, midlife. Tommi Parrish’s graphic story is about a ranting, middle-aged man at a bar who fails to connect with others. At the end of the story he is lying naked in his garden – I won’t describe what he is doing there, but it’s funny and a connection of sorts is finally made. This is a short chapter from a longer work about recovering addicts and other fractured characters – lumbering, gender-fluid people stumble through the pages; the dialogue is laconic, laced with gentle irony.
Perhaps the innocence of animals can be a salvation? Amy Leach’s fictional lecture coaches animals to count, to become more professional (and more human), less hopelessly poetical and inefficient in their doings: ‘Sometimes, when you see the emerald and ruby and sapphire sparkles on the snow, it seems like you are rich; sometimes it seems you can’t get along without someone, seems the winter will never end, seems the moon is abnormally big coming over the mountains. But measurement dispenses with all the seeming: the bank account is low, the moon is normal-sized, etc.’
Other than Dauod’s eulogy, we have three non-fiction pieces in this issue. Jack Kerouac travelled across America with Neal Cassady and others, an epic road trip described in his novel On the Road. Recently, Andrew O’Hagan told me about visiting Cassady’s widow, Carolyn, who was living in a mobile home outside Windsor. I commissioned him to write this piece. ‘They were just boys,’ she says of Jack and Neal and the others. ‘Just boys. But they had seen the sun together and that is everything.’
The second piece is also about old age. Photographer Michael Collins meticulously records the decline of his mother, who suffered from a series of strokes, gradually losing her ability to speak. His own terse language is perfectly in keeping with the subject matter; this is a sad story, and an important one.
Oliver Bullough, finally, describes what happened when a lawyer rewrote British Virgin Island company law, creating new channels for hidden money. Such is the power of language: words become law; laws change the world.
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