Tell a Good Story

What makes a good story? What keeps us turning the pages of a book or clicking the next episode of a TV show or going to movie theaters? 
 
One of the most compelling aspects of any story are the characters. If we cannot connect with the main hero in the story, we won’t continue the story. We don’t even have to connect with them on a deeply personal level, we just want to know they’re human.
 
We tend to care less about characters who have perfect lives, always make the perfect decisions, and never seem to try all that hard to accomplish their goals. What we want is to watch someone really try to accomplish something. We want to see the blood, sweat, and tears. We want there to be heartache and triumph! 
 
We also don’t connect with characters who never learn and never grow. They become so stagnant and unchanging that we become bored and frustrated watching them.

Though this is our innate preferences for stories, we seem to forget this when it comes to our own lives. We expect that everyone around us wants perfection from us. They want us to never have failed and to never fail again; to be perfect now and to never waiver from that, always being exactly as we were made to be.
 
We think that this will make people like us better, approve of us more, respect us more. We think it makes our own lives a better story. But, in reality, we become like every way-too-perfect character in books, movies, or TV shows: boring, un-relatable, and not compelling. We also want this no-hardship-or-failure life for ourselves. The amount of work and pain that goes in to truly being the hero of your own story sometimes seems like too much to bear. 
 
Yet, no matter how badly we wish our stories were great if we were only perfect all the time, our stories are actually made better through our quirks and differences, through our pain and our struggles, through our breaking and our growth. We are made better through becoming the heroes of our own stories, through risking failure for something greater.
 
What kind of story do you want? 


Blessing,
The Witheos Team