De-Dazzling

I'm having a problem with my character description for a new series pitch. The pitch is almost ready to go out the door, but I'm hung up on this page-and-a-half.

I like this lead character: she's interesting, has a tough problem and a clear ambition. I was happy with my first draft of her bio. It was some pretty lively prose, packed with information, a surprise or two, some snappy bits...still, she just didn't feel compelling.

Tinkering only seems to make things worse. The profile is developing an unfriendly density as I cram more details into it, hoping they would make the character clearer. What was at one time my favourite part of the pitch is turning into the worst. That's what happens during rewrites sometimes.

I was unsnarling another set of notes on the hard copy and, honestly, whining to myself about it, when a friend posted 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer  on Facebook. (My 1 Insight on Reading 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer? Just choose one. You can't make much use of 25 hard-earned words of wisdom all at once. Get the one you need and hightail it out of there.)

The one I need is this:

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, not my games with language, you say, Kurt?

Now, pitches are a bit about games with language -- I'm trying to squeeze an entire show's brilliance into a few pages, so style is important. I want it to be engaging, and to convey the mood and imply a whole whack more information than I have room to provide. So I've been focused on keeping it lively.

But if even I'm reading this character description and not feeling it, there's a fundamental problem that no amount of style is going to fix. No matter what else, it needs to be clear what I genuinely care about with this character.

So I took a couple of hours of escape from style. I set the bio aside and, on a (virtual) fresh sheet of paper, I listed the important things about the character in short, declarative sentences, with no embellishment.

Stripped of its style, the problem with the profile became clear -- there were gaps that I'd been using style to hand-wave over. Using the new information from my list, I was able to reconstruct the bio with less hand-waving and clearer language. I had to kill a few babies -- sentences that seemed elegant or lively but weren't carrying their weight. Now I'm much happier with the new draft.

I remember worrying years ago, as a newer-newbie writer, about style: did I have any and -- since I suspected I did not -- how would I go about getting it?  At that time, I thought style was something you add at the end of the process, like with a hot glue gun.

It's still something of a mystery to me, but like so many things, looking back I wish I had worried less and written more. I suspect it sorts itself out in quantity, to a certain degree, and the rest as your taste develops and you identify your point of view on the material.

Now I believe style is built in at every stage. In the end, its effect is like a smile: when it's genuine, coming from the heart, you can hardly stop it. And it just works.