Your entire story hinges on character. There’s nothing more important in your story than that. In this episode, Zena Dell Lowe lists 5 ways in which characters are better than real.

1. Characters are compressed in time. Just try to fit a real person's life into a book or a movie. You can’t do it, it’s too much. If you’re having trouble in your story, it may be because your story is too big and you need to narrow down the scope.

2. Their lives are vetted for our entertainment. We have to compress our stories in time and deal with one particular event. But in order to do that, it means we have to select only those details that matter.

3.  Normal life does not have heightened, sustained conflict. If it did, we would die. But everything that happens in the story is either exciting or on the verge of being exciting, or temporarily coming down from a time that was just very exciting.

4.  We have extraordinary access to them. We know characters in a much deeper, much fuller way than we could ever know anyone in real life. And we know they will never change. Rick Blaine will always be Rick Blaine.

5. They have a consistency we can count on. That means that they have to be comprehensible and believable to us. Their actions need to ring true in accordance with who we’ve come to understand them to be. 

Join us next week as we dive even deeper into story.

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