This made me realize that providing goals for characters does more than create tension and draw story arcs, it also gives readers a way to connect with the characters on a very personal level — especially when they have similar life-goals.

Louis L’amour’s characters universally struggle with one thing: making a good life for themselves. He nearly always chooses characters that are adolescents, who have just left their family and are own their own for the first time, and he follows them until they finally make it as adults and have wealth and property and the love of a desirable woman. When he presents these characters, I can immediately connect with them because that transition in my personal life was highly important to me. I think that is why Louis can write 120 novels, all basically the same, yet all thoroughly enjoyable by his fans such as myself.

I’m not so sure. Not to be stereotypical, but the Italians do tend to be a passionate people…

~Graham

I sometimes wonder if it’s been to my detriment to seek professional instruction on writing. In all those rules and prescribed story arcs, have I lost my natural voice? Henry Miller said he had to write a million words before he found his. He had to write until he’d exorcised himself of all the preconceived notions about writing heaped upon him. Perhaps that’s the solution: read all you can, write all you can, and one day you’ll be so fed up with it all that your own voice will emerge.

Literary writers put words on a page to be noticed, fiction writers want theirs to disappear. But readers are a tough lot, they always want something different and new, and yet the same.