Recapturing the Wonder of Life

First, let me get on a soapbox about reading: Writers need to read good books. Classics, literature, beach books, fiction and non-fiction. We need to read it all. Even the books that we may not think are applicable to our creative writing can actually be a well-spring of ideas. End soapbox.

Last night, I finished up Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: A Story of Success (recommended), this morning, I started Ravi Zacharias's Recapture the Wonder. Two pages in, I found an important lesson in characterization.

Zacharias describes a scene of an old man sorting the garbage, looking for a morsel to eat. In this land of abundance and opportunity, you can't help but look--and then quickly look away, because those sights make us feel very uncomfortable, right?

When you see the homeless, you wonder how a person got in that state: dirty, hungry, cold. Ravi's wife makes a simple, yet thought-provoking statement about this scene.

"To think that he was once a baby, held in the arms of his mother while she dreamed great dreams for him," she said.

Contrast this person with a multi-millionaire, not in terms of what you can see, but what you can't. How is his heart? Is he disillusioned with life? Does he live in a vacuum? Does he scavange around like the homeless man, but instead of looking for food, he's trying to find sustenence by filling up sex, drugs and alcohol? Does he buy relationships? Is his idol money?

In all walks of life, disillusionenment comes easy; in this culture, where cynism runs rampant and relationships weaken without a blink, anyone can go through life as a zombie. We all search for sustenence, we all put our faith in something--because we're human and that's how God made us.

Think about your characters in the pieces you're writing. Disillusionment is strong human characteristic; the men or women you're writing about don't always have to be special (but they can be), they can just be ordinary people.

So what's the lesson here? Create characters that the reader can relate to. Show their struggle and, because they are human, show how they overcome their struggle.