Getting into character

Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’.

Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’. One, for example, turned down a novel of mine because she ‘felt the lack of any character with whom the reader could identify’. This was irritating rather than soothing. It’s natural for a child to identify with a fictional character. At the age of seven or eight I desperately wanted to be the American boy Kit in my favourite Enid Blyton novel, The Boy Next Door. He dressed up as a Red Indian and hid from the villains in a houseboat moored up a backwater: enchanting. Later I graduated to D’Artagnan and Alan Breck. But one is supposed to grow up and to be able, as an adult, to enjoy novels without feeling the need for such identification.