Often times you will hear authors talk about the details of plots and how to write great ones the readers will love and accept as believable. They cite any number of rules on how to write, and bring up rules of things never to do. While all this can be useful in making better writers, I think the more useful things to talk about are how well you can make the readers connect with your characters, and at the end of the book be able to say to themselves…”gee, I wish I could meet them” or, “I hope things turn out okay for them,” or “I wonder how they are doing?” Writing may be about rules, all well and good, but if you don’t draw the reader into caring about what happens to characters, all the story techniques won’t matter a bit. Can you relate to the character, can you understand their concerns and fears? Formulaic writing works, but almost always, it works best when you come to love the character. It’s why quirky Stephanie Plum keeps you coming back, It’s why Walt Longmire concerns you as to how his life is turning out, it’s why Joe Pickett’s family struggles and frustrations with the government and his love of the environment makes him so much more real to us, and we root for him and come to care about the outcome. It’s why we love Harry Bosch because we know how he feels about his daughter and the agonies he feels over growing up an orphan of a murdered mother. A story without characters you love and identify with on some level can have the greatest plot ideas and still fall flat. I like what Tony Hillerman once said. He gets to know his characters in the deepest ways, and let’s them write the story they want to write. What will your characters say?
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I spent so many years living in the wild that I still can’t get enough of it. I love hanging out in the pine forest around my home. It gives me a sense of connection and peace every time I spend any time in it. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of discussions with locals who don’t understand forest management or fire fighting tactics and technology. I recently had to disavow someone of the misconception that airplanes that spread fire retardant slurry on the forest ahead of a fire are destroying the forest from ever growing again. It’s amazing the disinformation that gets spread out in the community. We also had a long discussion about fire mitigation efforts that involve removing trees and other ladder fuels. Of course the bias was that the forest was being decimated, when the truth was that removing some of these understory fuels was important to mimic the effect of historically normal and needed fires that we now do everything we can to prevent or extinguish. Preservation and protection of wildlands and parks is important to me, and it is at the core of all the made up stories that I write. It’s amazing to me how little folks know about how that is accomplished, and how much disinformation is out there from biased parties with an agenda.
Today, I enjoyed seeing that my local forest is doing mitigation clearing efforts along one of my favorite hiking trails along Aspen Creek. I fell in love with reading in the fourth grade. Mr. Sobel let me read one of the Hardy Boys books, that later were made really famous by Walt Disney, and I was hooked. He cared enough to bring them to me from his home library. That’s just the kind of teacher he was, and I will be forever grateful, even if he couldn’t spell Antarctica (that was my first experience in learning that teachers are human, too.) So, I lived with getting it wrong on my spelling test even though I knew it was right. I didn’t challenge him, because I didn’t want to embarrass him…and he might not bring me anymore Hardy Boys books to read! |
Greg
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