Fantasy and science fiction are often derided as nothing more than unicorns and spaceships that take the reader far away to a land that's easier to deal with. If that was the case, the connotations of the term "escapism" would be richly deserved. But what if those unicorns are vicious, and those spaceships crash?
Novels, movies, comic books, they're all full of problems. Even if they aren't problems that could possibly occur in the real world, they are real problems because of the most important element of any story worth telling... the characters.
Read ten books and you'll meet a hundred new people. If the books are written well, you'll care about those people. They will seem real to you. And that's not a delusion, it's a tool. Watching how the characters interact will always tell you something about how people work because every character, no matter how outlandish, originally sprang from the mind of a real person. The more characters you meet, the more you'll have to hold up to a new acquaintance when you wonder how he or she will behave. I think for every individual there is a character somewhere to identify with. It will never be exact, but it's a way of seeing. A way of understanding.
As the current television season starts, I find I'm drawn to more and more shows. Character-driven shows. My intention is to blog about the points in each that stand out to me as real for one reason or another. Maybe someone else, somewhere, will start looking at fiction as a lens, too. Maybe, just maybe, it'll help them understand someone else a little better.
