Something Greater Than Ourselves
One of the standard requirements of a story is having a character or characters with some kind of goal or desire.  It's their drive to reach their goal that pushes the story along.  So, I recently started reading Undertow, by Elizabeth Bear (my first try with this author), and I struggled with the beginning of it, lots of characters, and lots of description.  I could only grab fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there, to read the book, and I found myself completely confused after about forty pages, so I started over and really paid attention to the different characters and slowed my reading down so I could fully grasp the world that the author was building.  I rarely start over like that, because if the story doesn't grab me, I'd rather spend my limited time reading something else that does, but people I respect continue to praise her writing, so I wanted to give it a respectable try. 

I must admit that sometimes I grow impatient with descriptions, because it often gets in the way of the story (for me), but when I slowed myself down, I really couldn't fault any of the descriptions as being out of place.  They did a good job of coloring in the strangeness of this world.  And by starting over and slowing down, I kept better track of the characters and found of course that they all had goals and desires.  And yet, I still wasn't hooked into the story ... until I got to somewhere close to page 100.  And then it grabbed me and I'm running with it, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

So, I had to scratch my head a bit to figure out what happened, and I realized that prior to that point, the characters all had their own goals and desires, but for the most part, everyone was trying to do their own thing, meet their own needs.  But, then it was revealed that their were bigger things going on in the galaxy, things that could have dire consequences for everyone, human and alien alike.  It sets up lot's of questions where you have to ask if the bad guys are really bad and the good guys really good.  But mostly what it does is moves the goals and desires from a strictly personal level to something that is important for a lot of people. 

This is where art imitates life.  If everyone cares only for their own issues, tries to solve only their own personal problem, we don't get very excited about it.  For instance, let's say it's my goal to get ahead at work, but I have a crappy boss trying to keep me down.  Maybe if I watch the boss very closely, I can find him doing something really bad and work through the inherent roadblocks of the system but eventually cause him to be fired.  If I make myself really sympathetic to you, you might be interested in my story simply because you want to see me win.  But, let's assume that I'm not so sympathetic.   I make a decent living already and there's lots of people who would love to have my job, so going after the boss can become very petty ... unless ... I'm going after the boss because he represents all that's bad with the company and by going after him, I'm making changes in the company that will benefit everyone.  It's the idea of doing something that's greater than ourselves that resonates.

I need to remember this in my own writing.