Psst! Wanna hear a secret? The people in most stories aren t really humans -they re robots! Real people are quite accidental, the result of a random jumbling of genes
and a chaotic life.
But story people are made to order to do a specific job.
In other...
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Psst! Wanna hear a secret? The people in most stories aren t really humans -they re robots! Real people are quite accidental, the result of a random jumbling of genes
and a chaotic life.
But story people are made to order to do a specific job.
In other words,
robots! I can hear some of you pooh-poohing this notion, but it s not my idea.
It goes
back twenty-five hundred years to the classical playwrights.
In Greek tragedy, the main
character was always specifically designed to fit the particular plot.
Indeed, each
protagonist was constructed with an intrinsic hamartia, or tragic flaw, keyed directly to
the story s theme.
These days, writers have more latitude in narrative forms, but we still
try to construct characters appropriate to a given tale.
Consider, for instance, Terence M.
Green s Barking Dogs.
The book posits the
invention of infallible portable lie detectors.
Of all the people in the world, Green chooses
to give such a device to Mitch Helwig, a Toronto cop.
Why tha
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