Challenge
Empathy
Make your readers care about your characters. It’s a piece of advice you hear a lot in the writing world. Strange, isn’t it, that invoking empathy is a marketable skill?
Anyway, try to make us connect with a character in one short paragraph.
Poison
Her barbed words are laced with a vicious poison which she dispenses liberally to those around her. The deadly mixture she got from the barbs others threw at her, so many years ago. They slipped under her radar and filled her blood with poison and fear and now she is stuck, throwing barbs at those who try to get close enough to soothe her fears - or stab her again.