Stories Are Human

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about… well, everything. People really like to trash-talk popular things. Given that I’m in the storytelling world, I see a lot of people trying to dunk on popular stories.

One of the big ones right now is the new Spider-Man movie (no spoilers, I promise), but almost all of the complaints that I’m seeing are superficial. The people complaining care about which character did and didn’t show up on screen. They care about Peter’s powers and abilities. They care about how it ties into the wider MCU.

But that was never the point.

The point was to tell a story about Peter.

There are plenty of stories about kingdoms, empires, republics, and foundations. There are huge stories that span decades, encompass a worldwide history, and have simply an enormous scale.

But that only goes so far.

We as individuals cannot relate to an empire. We can’t relate to a world populace. We can’t relate to factions.

But we can relate to the people who make up those factions.

When we tell a story through the eyes of the individuals who shape it, we suddenly throw the reader into the trenches. They’re not just passive onlookers watching from afar. They feel what the characters feel, see the world through their eyes, and experience the story firsthand.

Bigger stories don’t mean bigger emotions. Sometimes, a story can be small but create big feelings in the reader because of how deeply human it is. A story might take place in a single small town, but if the stakes are important enough to the main character, then they’ll be important to the reader, too.

This is because stories aren’t about events. They’re about feelings. Stories stir emotions, and readers want to feel that. If a reader goes through the first few chapters not feeling or caring about anything that’s happening in the story or any of the people involved, are they really going to stick around to the end?

That’s why grounding a story in a human perspective is so important. When we experience someone’s story through their eyes, we don’t just watch the events play out; we feel them and care about the changes that they create.

This, I think, is why I’ve found history so fascinating lately. It’s not about the major events, the big battles, or the leaps in technology. It’s how it affects the lives of the people; and it’s the lives of the people that create those events, fight those battles, and discover new technology. Events rarely just happen. More often than not, they’re spawned out of a human action or reaction that comes from emotion.

That’s what we, as writers, need to remember when writing stories. Characters aren’t just things to push the plot forward. They’re not vessels used to represent different ideas without having any of their own. They’re people. Flawed, self-contradicting, emotion-feeling people. They love, hate, lust for revenge, strive for justice, long for control, and are jealous of others who seemingly have it all together.

Grounding our stories in human perspectives also gives us the opportunity to learn more about the people around us and look outside of ourselves. We not only see others and witness their actions, but we strive to understand them. Why do people believe what they believe? Why do they say one thing and do another? Why do they dress the way they dress, eat what they eat, and talk the way they talk?

The better we understand people, the more we love them, and the more we love them, the better we can use that understanding in creating our own characters for our stories. Because characters are not tools. They’re thinking, breathing, and feeling people who deserve the attention of the writer.

This is a shorter article today, but I wanted to write it for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s something I’ve learned from writing Killstream 3 and trying to make it the best it can be. I want the characters to be their own people, and I want them to feel real. The second reason was the Battlestar Galactica episode that I watched last night.

The episode’s plot focused on a news reporter who was allowed on the military vessel called the Battlestar Galactica to give the military protecting the last fleet of humanity a face that the people can rely on and relate to. During the episode, we see glimpses of interviews with crew and pilots. Some are interviews with people you’d expect, like Captain Apollo and Vice President Baltar. But others are with people I didn’t expect, like Lieutenant Gaeta, where we learn why he joined the Navy in the first place and what he thinks about it now. We learn that Gaeta, despite everything, is spending the little free time he has trying to find himself since military work is all he’d ever known. He’d never taken the time to figure out what his interests are until now.

A story about the last fleet of humanity fleeing from a cybernetic army is interesting, but what makes it great is when we learn more about the people in the ships, how they’re dealing with the stress and pressure of being the last humans alive, and who they are and what their interests are.

Even the background characters are people, and that makes every loss in the show hit that much harder.

Make your reader care about the characters, and then they’ll care about everything that happens to them, too.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today’s article. There’s a new one every Monday, not to mention a new chapter in my sci-fi adaptation of Norse mythology every Friday, so subscribe to get everything sent straight to your inbox.

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