A number of films have come out recently that have had varying degrees of visual excellence, but have skimped on storytelling. Some of these movies I was inclined to like, such as the animated feature 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar, while others, such as J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek, have earned my distaste. All of these movies go wrong in the story department at some point, and much of it has to do with their use and development of their characters. Such failings in popular cinema should serve to remind the writer, of both prose and screen, of the import of creating engaging persons to populate a story.

Employing good characterization is often lauded, but the reason for this is often unexplained. The simplest explanation is that the characters are windows into the world you have created: by sympathizing for and against them, the audience is drawn into the universe woven by the author. The corollary to this is that the characters are the world, and are the story, and cannot be separated from either.

Humans are social beings, and are thus interested in the happenings of other humans. Evolution has seen to it that the survivors of nature’s bloody breeding program in the genus homo rely upon each other for their sustenance. It is believed that the social development of hominids led to modern humans’ large brains and technology, as the ability to communicate information to one another became our greatest adaptive advantage. It likely drove our moral concern for one another as well, and it is no wonder, given how essential communities are for our continuation, that we do have such a profound interest in one another’s affairs.

The ramification for stories is that a fictional world without life or mind is uninteresting, because there is nobody to sympathize with and no personal investment to be made. While many a disaster story has relied upon nature’s wrath to drive the plot, said fury only gains relevance in context of how it affects the lives of sentient beings. Watching cumulous clouds billow for two hours is not particularly interesting, at least not in a theater. But seeing them do so for two seconds, realizing it portends doom for the little fishing town nearby, can be captivating.

It’s all because, as people, we look to stories to help understand our minds and our relationships—to ourselves, to others and to the universe. They open up new possibilities for us, and we want those possibilities to potentially involve ourselves, and thus a human presence becomes essential. And the more interesting, understandable, and genuine that presence is, the more we become involved in that story, the more possibilities we can experience.

When all’s said and done, though, it’s easy to expound upon the importance of characters in a story, and harder to actually create convincing individuals around which a tale revolves. That I shall save for Part 2.