You gotta have heart.

I've mentioned before that I started off on the wrong foot with Faerylander.  I was more concerned about ideas and plot than I was in telling a story with heart.

A story has to have heart.  The reader has to care about some of the characters, there has to be some kind of cathartic resolution.

Which comes back to storytelling.

So while the mechanics of plot and grammar and ideas and all that are important -- they are the tools -- they are not the end goal.  I think you can have a really good story where the plot and the writing is messy.  I think you can have an incredibly boring stale story where the plot and the writing are precise.  I'll take the former any day of the week.

After much rewriting, I've managed to put the heart back into Faerylander, but it was a tough thing to do.  Much easier to include it from the beginning.

I'm proud of both Led to the Slaughter and The Vampire Evolution Trilogy in that the focus was on the people and their relationships.

The current book, Ghostlander, needed some plot elements, and I was 50 pages in before it all came together.  I've hinted at the 'human heart' elements, but I really need them to become the central focus from here on as well as going back over the first 50 pages beefing that up.

It's possible to write a book of "ideas" or "action" or "fast plot" or whatever.  But fundamentally you need someone to care about, someone to identify with.

Even the anti-hero needs to be someone you can root for.  (I saw a foreign film last night, "On The Job" where the main character by any objective standard is a complete monster -- but he is also the most sympathetic character in the film.  Great film by the way.)

When I started Faerylander, most of the young people I talked to seemed intrigued by ideas -- they wanted a unique twist, or something really different and original, and by all means all that is important.  But at the core of the story there has to be heart, caring about what happens to the characters.