An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.\u00a0 A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.\u00a0 A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.\u00a0 A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.\u00a0 Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.\u00a0 A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.\u00a0 A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn\u2019t have any oranges on it.\u00a0 A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.<\/p>\n
What do all of these stories have in common?\u00a0 Well, almost nothing.\u00a0 Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.\u00a0 But otherwise, they\u2019re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.\u00a0 But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.\u00a0 It\u2019s as simple as that.<\/p>\n
We recognize Frodo\u2019s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.\u00a0 We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.\u00a0 We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.\u00a0 We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.<\/p>\n
So, what is the most important aspect?\u00a0 Plot or character?\u00a0 I used to think plot.\u00a0 After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.\u00a0 But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.\u00a0 And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.\u00a0 Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don\u2019t believe the hero is real?<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s the trick for the author.\u00a0 Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.\u00a0 Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.\u00a0 Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.\u00a0 But when it\u2019s done right it\u2019s the rewarding part of writing.\u00a0 Self-satisfaction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.\u00a0 A famous play<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2510,1289,818,1263],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-29620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-literature","category-fiction-by-me","category-ocf","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-fiction-writing"],"yoast_head":"\n