Enduring Characters

Over the long holiday weekend, the DH and I went to the new Star Trek movie. Ok, I'll 'fess up. I am a trekkie. I've loved STAR TREK since I was a kid. I so totally bought into those lame special effects for the original TV show. (I think we brought a little more imagination to our TV watching then!)

And I loved this new movie too. The new actors all ramped up the "hot-o-meter" by several orders of magnitude compared to the originals and the special effects were so completely believable, I had to bring no imagination to the experience at all. But the reason I loved the movie had nothing to do with those things.

It's because the story was about all the characters I loved as a kid--Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, Scotty and Dr. McCoy. Each time one of them appeared you could almost hear all the trekkies in the theatre sigh in collective satisfaction. It really didn't matter what the story was. It was all about the characters. We were there for them.

As a writer, that's a good lesson for me to keep in mind. No matter how cleverly plotted a book is, only a beloved character will keep a reader coming back.

Who are your favorite characters? Is there a character you've invested your heart in?