What makes a good story?
Is it an epic setting like Pandora from Avatar? Is it a bunch of great characters like the cast from Harry Potter? Is it a fully fleshed-out world like Lord of the Rings, with fully-formed languages and histories for the mythical races? Or is it something more down to earth that under girds everything you are building like the concrete at the base of a foundation?
A story without a heart, isn’t a story at all.
Every example that I mentioned, including Avatar even though it barely made the list, have a heart. In Avatar, the world pulls you in and you want to care about that world. You want it to survive, you want the good guys to win, and you certainly want the bad guys to pay. In Harry Potter, you feel for the characters when they are hurting, mourning, or rejoicing. You feel like you know them and you understand what they are going through. Lord of the Rings is a perfect example of how to balance setting and character development. No one has ever met an elf or stopped a dark lord, but we understand friendship, sacrifice, and loss. By the end of the story, we hurt like they hurt, we’ve cried tears for their loss, and have come to grips with the cost of doing what is right. What sucked us into that world and made us believe, even a moment, that the story was real?
It was the story’s heart.
Now, when I say a story has heart, I’m saying that the author tapped into the very basic things that make us human, and infused those characteristics in the characters. We all have friends, enemies, hopes, dreams and we all have an inherent desire to be understood, to feel like someone else knows how we feel. Why does the “death” of Harry Potter have such emotional weight to it? Because we understand the sacrifice, we understand deep down how his friends feel, believing that he really is dead. Why do we root for Frodo to climb Mount Doom and destroy the ring? Because by that time, we want Frodo to be free, we want the Shire to be safe, and we want evil to lose.
The story has stopped being “just a story”. It has stopped being a robot. Even a mechanically sound robot with fully functional and working parts is still a robot. It is foreign (although fascinating) to us. But the thing is, we don’t care if the robot breaks or “dies”, we can just get a new one tomorrow. No, this robot has become human. It has traded in its heart of metal, gears, and oil and now has a real flesh and blood human heart. It can feel pain, sadness, despair, and joy. We care if it breaks, we care if it dies. It stops being an “it” and becomes a he or she.
All of these literary devices are great tools to help build great characters, but what these stories also have going for them is the setting. We believe in the lie the author is telling us. We believe in the mythology because we want to. We want dragons and goblins and fairies to be real. We want wizardry to exist and we really wish there was a world called Pandora. The setting gives the characters a world of their own and, a really good author, makes the world change based upon the choices of those characters. For instance, have you ever noticed that it is almost always raining outside when a tragedy, like the main character’s wife dying, happens? This is a great use of setting to convey a subconscious idea to the reader. And you know what? We buy it every time. We believe in the characters because we believe in the world they live in.
However, my favorite books are the ones that explore simple human stories, especially stories of people dealing with extreme hurt and pain. I love books like Lovely Bones, Willow, If I Stay, and Redeeming Love because the focus is solely on the characters and how do they deal with tragedy. How would you react if you felt you were to blame for your parents death? What if you truly believed that the pain of cutting was far less painful then the thought of dealing with your own guilt and shame? That is the question Willow asks and that not many people truly want to answer or deal with. The concept that challenged me was Willow’s belief that it was easier to deal with physical pain, cathartic even, then to deal with the emotional pain of losing her parents. She had numbed herself so much that she wasn’t sure she could even handle her emotions anymore. This is a powerful picture painted by the author where the story takes center stage and the setting is complimentary, although still important. After all, the setting must still make sense. It must reinforce the story being told and be a reflection the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters.
What about Lovely Bones? What is its “pull” or “hook”? That story centers around a different kind of tragedy, set in a normal neighborhood and with a normal family. What would you do if someone in your family, a young member of that family, was brutally murdered? What would you do if you were in love with her, even at that young age? What would you do if “you felt her spirit fly through you to leave the earth”? The “hook” of this story is multifaceted but is primarily built around two things. One, the everyday, normal setting juxtaposed with the horrific nature of the crime. Two, the aftermath of what took place as viewed through the eyes of the murdered girl in her version of heaven. The story follows the family and community as they attempt to move on and also how each person deals with the event in their own way. The power of that book is in the simplicity of the language and the realistic reactions and decisions of the characters involved.
I could continue on with my thought on the two books (and I might in the future, we’ll see) but I will end with this. A good story is not about what kind of horrific material you can fit in or how crazy a world you can create, although both have their place. It is about who populates the world of your story and could they be transported to earth and blend in? And if they can’t, do their abnormalities make sense? Are they unique, or odd, for a good reason? You could be writing a story about a robot, set in the distant dystopian future and make that character so real that he could be your next door neighbor. He could shoot lasers out his eyes and speak only in pig-latin and be completely believable to your audience. If, and only if, he has a heart.
boughtbygrace 