Genuine Human Response

I am reading a friend's unpublished novel. I have been deplorably slow in reading through a scant 200 pages. One day, I told my friend this and explained why. Part of it is that the unplanned parts of life got in the way, but more of it was that the book wasn't my cup of tea. Not a genre I cared for, etc.

Although I was told that I didn't have to keep reading, I knew I was going to. First of all, I said I was. Second, I like to read my friends' writings - the opportunity is not so frequent and I want to see what they have to say. Third, I have learned from experience with other friends' writings that I could totally have a story pegged wrong and get blown away if I kept reading. And I had to know if that would happen.

Tonight, I continued reading, and I got blown away.

One of the things that bothered me was that the cast was high school students and listening to high school problems is so ridiculous. But as I read one of those ridiculous situations, the paragraph that followed was the protagonist's reaction. And that reaction was powerful.

To an outsider looking in, relationships and all related drama sound like melodrama. But to the person experiencing it, it is their entire world. My friend expertly captured that. She used just the right words that caught my attention and made me feel. She described the reaction like a real human would react, like I myself would probably react. I had to keep going.

As I continued reading, real drama happened. Things got serious. They got exciting. I literally only stopped reading because it was 3 AM and I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Some of this was the author's doing. She made some crazy stuff happen that shook things up. But what was most compelling was the characters. They were real. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about how well people's thoughts and actions were like my own or like people I knew.

I speak often of our characters and the effort that we should put in to convey their reality. I sometimes forget what it is like to be a reader experiencing that (I read too much nonfiction nowadays, so prose fiction is special).

No matter how silly a situation may seem to you, the people in it see it as quite serious. As such, they have a genuine human reaction to it. That's what makes a story powerful.