Make Them Care

Continuing our discussion, but in a different vein, from yesterday, I have three words.

Make them care.

And now, of course, I have more words. From the Dalai Lama:

We must recognise that the suffering of one person or one nation is the suffering of humanity. That the happiness of one person or nation is the happiness of humanity.
~Tenzin Gyatso

Someone recently asked me (and I am really paraphrasing here, for expediency), why I choose to feed one homeless person on Tuesday nights, instead of, perhaps, forming an organization to try to get at the root of the problem. That quote kind of sums it up for me. Not that I wouldn't choose to do things in an organized sense. But . . . I guess I just look at it in terms of individual people.

In any case, I can take that idea back to the writing. We have to make readers care. Even in a thriller, a race against time to save humanity, it will almost always, in a good book, boil down to the main character equating humanity with his or her family. If today was the end of the world. I would lament the loss of humanity's paintings and music, and the ocean and the trees. I would be panicking, along with all of the world as we ran screaming from the aliens or whatever it was that was ending the world. But in the end . . . I would gather my children in my big bed, and I would want to be with THEM. Quietly. They're the ones I would miss. If airplanes were still running ahead of this big collapse of civilization, I'd have my mom and dad come, my best friend. But it's still about the people. MY people.

Think of big problems. Global warming. Even scientists know to bring it down to the polar bars cubs, so cute and cuddly. Or the penguins. People CARE about that more than "how many degrees warmer" it's getting.

Even the Holocaust, horrific and overwhelming . . . is for many people brought to a person. A writer, actually. A young girl with a diary. Hidden. Anne Frank.

Yesterday, we discussed relevance. And maybe relevance is just another way of saying make them care. It doesn't matter if it's a comedy, women's fiction, a thriller, a mystery. Readers have got to FEEL the quest your main character is on.

Writers talk about "the black moment"--that big, dark moment. For me, I have to say, it often boils down to small moments. To make them care moments. I can rattle off the small moments, versus the climaxes of the books, because they are very real to me: when Ava's box of treasures was intentionally destroyed in The Roofer. When Cassie Hayes mourned with the little bunny on her chest, in bed, drinking tequila, in Spanish Disco (yes, I just wrote "bunny"--if you haven't read the book, suffice it to say it was a running gag). When Skye McNalley , in Double Down, told about the night the police raided her house when she was a little girl and she knew there was a stash, a gaping hole, inside her doll that her father used to hide stolen goods.

Thoughts? How do you make readers care?