Desire

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
Joan Didion.

Dinty Moore, in The Story Cure (A Book Doctor's Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir: one reason many stories don't succeed is that the main character (or yourself if it's memoir) doesn't want anything.  In a good story, somebody has to want something--to find the murderer, to end an imprisoning relationship, to understand, to resolve conflict, to marry a certain person, to get revenge, whatever.

A good story taps into the vein, he says, of all human desire--and the crooked journey to seek what we want. We might not want exactly what the protagonist wants, but we know what it's like to travel and struggle and meander in search of something.

But what's deeper than the desire for a particular thing or person?  And what if we never find it?  And what if we think we've found it and it turns out not to satisfy the deeper yearning?

The most riveting stories tap into a universal desire for meaning, or truth, or fulfillment, or love, or even for something we don't know how to name until we find it.  We sense desire on page one and continue reading to understand the dynamics of searching, finding, not finding, and to vicariously experience the journey of looking for something.

A story that just tells "what happens"--he was born this year, he tried this, he met her, he failed--is unsatisfying because we want to know the underlying "River" (as Moore calls it) in which all these details add up to the Hero's or Heroine's Journey.

A sequence of events is not inherently a story.  What makes it a story is the way every word, every page, taps into the River.  I recommend this book for all writers and readers.