The Craft of Storytelling: Endearing Characters

A wise, old man once told me, “Young people like to write about death. All their stories are about facing death, facing disease, facing a gun, losing a father, losing a brother, losing a baby. They need to know what it is to face unemployment, face a child with a note in your hand that just says “Gone out,” lose a job, lose a house, lose your heart, lose your pride. Then, they’ll have something to write about.”

Subsequently, I have participated in several writing workshops where the only rules are:

• No death or terminal illness
• No big guns
• No genre fiction (ghost stories, sci-fi, fantasy).

Death and terminal illness are fine in memoirs. Big guns are fine in plot driven stories. Genre fiction is fine for your third or fourth attempt at creating a story, but not to start off—you get too caught up in creating an imaginary world so that your characters become understudies.

The first chore of telling a story is to endear your audience to your main character. Why should they care about this person? If she has a big gun pointed at her, has liver cancer, and is being haunted by the ghost of her lost love, then we care about her for the wrong reasons. We don’t even have to know her to hope she finds a cure for cancer, doesn’t get shot, and wakes up from a bad dream to find that there is no ghost at after all. These are contrivances (nice word for “cheap shots”) to get people to care.

Now think of all the people you care about in real life. Do you care because they are victims of some dreadful circumstance? Hopefully, you care about them because you know their heart. Hopefully, you care about them in spite of their shortcomings. Think of someone you once knew that you wish you didn’t let get away, someone else who made an impact on one recurring theme in your life, someone you weren’t able to help when they needed a hand, someone you took time to change your whole day for. These are the seeds of the stories you will tell.

The wise, old man said it best, “Stories should be about life.”