It comes down to the #1 reason literary agents reject brilliant manuscripts: a little something called Narrative Distance.

Even if you’ve never heard this term, I guarantee you’ve experienced it.

It’s that sense of prose falling flat. That feeling of being outside the manuscript rather than sucked in. That nagging thing that keeps you aware that you’re consuming a story rather than disappearing into it.

And therefore, you feel nothing while reading it.

Remember, this is an industry run based on the feels.

The underlying dynamic responsible for this distance?

A sense that you’re watching or reading a story from the outside, rather than feeling like you’re in the story, experiencing everything firsthand.

Let me give you an example:

We can make the prose prettier, more evocative:

…Better, but still, it falls a bit flat. You are aware you’re reading about a Sarah who is worried. You don’t feel like you are sucked into the scene.

Compare that to this:

Feel the difference?

Craft based revising— increases Narrative Distance. Because picking stronger adverbs, more evocative descriptions, all of this is carefully controlled buffing, oriented around choosing words that invoke admiration rather than embodiment.

Polish over presence.

The result: you’ll have pretty words that impress agents and acquisitions teams, but it won’t possess them.

This is the reason why your beta readers, writing workshops, craft books and developmental editors have left you no closer to that coveted offer of representation.

They’re all based on helping you better your craft—with a focus on prose and plot— rather than fixating on the only thing that matters…

What is the only thing, you ask?

Nothing drilled home for me exactly what sparks connection to a story like watching Christopher Nolan’s TENET.

The combination of Christopher Nolan and John David Washington (who I had loved in Black KKKlansman) should have been movie of the year for me.

The CGI was amazing and cutting edge. The action scenes were inventive with excellent fight choreography. The stakes were sky high and the premise was extremely “high-concept” and hook-y.

And yet.

There was 0 characterization. John David Washington’s character wasn’t even given a name, just called The Protagonist, and had no backstory, no meaningful relationships, no personality.

And even with the past, present and future at stake as the bad guy stole dangerous top-secret technology….

I yawned, leaned back into the couch, blindly grappled for my phone and started playing Candy Crush.

When I next looked up, the credits were rolling.

And this, my friend, is what agents are doing to your manuscript.

You don’t have the luxury of assuming otherwise.

Not the premise — they requested the full, so the premise already worked.

Not the plot — they read the synopsis, plot was never the question at the full request stage.

Not the theme–or your query would have been ghosted.

Nine times out of ten, agents say this when they didn’t connect to the character.

Think about your most obsessive reads — were you obsessed with the plot mechanics, the pinch point on page 67, or with the person at the center of it? It's always the person.

The protagonist is your window into the story, the person through whose eyes, ears, and mind you’re experiencing the events of the plot.

This is why all great and/or successful stories are character-driven.

Yes, even, and especially stories like Fourth Wing or 50 Shades of Gray, despite their haters.

Because, and I will emphasize this again–craft and Story are two different, exclusive and distinct things.

And every NYT Bestseller gets that way because they’ve hit the nail on the head with the latter.

They connect with people–hundreds of millions in some cases—spike their emotions, and have them turning pages late into the night, feeling the weight, the tension, the fear or the lust of the protagonist in their bones.

If we don’t connect to the protagonist, we surely aren’t going to give a single shit about what happens to them.

The plot ceases to matter.

Going all in on character is not a nice-to-have for diverse authors.

It is absolutely, fundamentally, utterly necessary to not just understand how this works, but what creates (and gets in the way of) that character connection.

Because we’re operating at a deficit non-diverse authors never experience.

The harsh truth is: literary agents are going to inherently have a harder time connecting to our characters.

Meaning, even if all were equal, they will feel more Narrative Distance reading your novel, than a non-diverse author.

The question is, of course, why?

And the answer will shed an angels-singing, mind-boggling, clarity-inducing light on why you’ve been trapped in query purgatory, and more importantly, how to escape…