In another thread I suggested how a liberal social orientation (social perspective, specifically not the political politics one) prevails in the marketplace, presumably because that's what more readers want. The need in story of a single focal character seems readymade to suit the liberal ideal: an individual as sovereign (in dramatic action) before the greater good, even when the greater good is the noble goal.

Conservative-oriented stories are still eminently marketable, though. Military science fiction trends toward conservative values of individual duty and honor to and sacrifice for the greater good. Force multiplication from unit tactics is a tried and true strategy since at least the Roman Phalanx. An individual warrior is not as combat effective as a single soldier maneuvering in concert with a group of soldiers persuing a common goal; notwithstanding a focal character is essential as far as story is concerned.

For some time I've been meditating and studying on another area for possible classification. A common motif in many stories is that of a familiar stranger struggling to belong in an alienating and hostile society. I favor that motif over many. Where does it come from, I've asked. Also, why do stories with that motif appeal to some readers and not at all to others.

I found a partial answer in reading Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. Reviewers at The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times damned it with faint praise and nitpicky deconstructions. I enjoyed the story thoroughly and disagreed with the reviewers assessments. I think they didn't get it. I did because it resonated with my experiences from the beginning. Its overarching motif is that of an emotionally damaged orphan struggling to fit into an indifferent society. What's causing the divide between my sentiments and reknowned reviewers' sentiments, another question raised.

A clue came from reprising a literature professor's answer to a rhetorical question in one of my response papers. The question: "Why does inspiration come so often to those who are troubled in life?" The professor's marked comment: "It's been said that people with happy lives and integrated personalities don't have any conflicts to work out through writing. So if they write, they write formula fiction and greeting card verse of the Margaret Steiner Rice variety." (Verbatim.) At the time, I was reading E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News for another class. Protagonist Quoyle and deuteragonist Agnis Hamm share a causal source of disintegrated identity that is worked out through the story. The disintegrated identity motif is what brings their seemingly separate stories into unity. The novel spoke deeply to me. "Integrated personalities" is the clue that opened me up for an expanse of exploration.

As far as my emerging writer endeavors are concerned, I found an answer in attachment theory as it relates to integrated personality: An evolving and ethological psychological theory "that provides a descriptive social and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships between human beings." [Wikipedia: Attachment Theory.] It's been around since the late 1950s. There's been quite a bit of scientific criticism against it. But it answers for me how a person with attachment dysfunctions might prefer stories about characters with attachment dysfunctions. We're trying to work it out any way we can, writer and reader.

Population studies indicate there are people ranging across an attachment function continuum from secure attachment to avoidant attachment to reactive attachment to disinhibited attachment. Roughly a third of a given population is likely to enjoy secure attachment, a middle third with avoidant attachment disorder, and the latter third divided half and half between reactive and disinhibited attachment disorders. Ethnicity, age, station in life, national origin, gender, cultural inclinations, whatever other classifications, apparently have no exemptions from attachment dysfunctions, excepting perhaps financial situations. Poverty causes a lot of problems.

Attachment function as part of identity integrity for establishing reader resonance is a potent consideration for developing characters and conflicts. Gustav Freytag, among many others, suggests that reader preferences revolve around internal character struggles. What better character struggle than difficulty fitting in, lack of belonging, being excluded, being an outsider? Attachment function is a fundamental concept for coming of age stories, but not exclusively to Young Adult fiction. Who hasn't had attachment struggles? Attachment function is fraught with character collisions. Attachment disorders have their ups and downs, though. Outsiders are good observers of the inner workings of a tightknit clique, but it's cold outside.

This has been bubbling in my fermenter for some time, far longer than it takes to make beer. It quickly turned to vinegar. For the price of an insight into reader resonance, I found out a brutal truth about myself. And that has been both emotionally rewarding and crushing. I've grown though, as a writer and a person.

Anyway, a reader who's never struggled to belong probably won't like a story with that motif. If there are such readers, I've not met them.

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It's been said that people with happy lives and integrated personalities don't have any conflicts to work out through writing. So if they write, they write formula fiction and greeting card verse of the Margaret Steiner Rice variety

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

But a burned out lightbulb that wants to change could conceivably change.

In story, authenticity is more important than accuracy. What disintegrated personality characters offer for story is endings with hopeful outcomes of reintegration. What readers want is hope that their struggles may resolve.

Another Young Adult story that doesn't depend on identity integrity is Stepanie Meyer's Twilight, a beauty and the beast story where the convention is beauty tames the savage beast. I can see its appeal to its target audience, but again, not to my tastes.

On the other hand, Cynthia Voight's Homecoming resonates with my tastes and experiences. It's an understated epic quest causing integration of adult identity in a young protagonist along the journey, and at the desitination, securing it as home. A mundane quest with loose parallels to Homer's Odyssey and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Homecoming portrays the struggles of an adolescent girl guiding her younger siblings across the East Coast to a relative's home after their mother self-destructs and winds up in an asylum.

In the fantastical genres, C.J. Cherryh's Cuckoo's Egg remains my all time favorite of identity integrity stories.

That's almost like saying that Barbara Hambly should not be allowed to write her Benjamin January novels because she's a modern white woman and he's a free black man living in antebellum New Orleans. She does an amazing job conveying his experiences to this reader, at least.

You don't have to experience something yourself in order to write about it well.

Edited to add: Yeah, I know. That contradicts "write what you know" but only if you don't bother to do your homework. You can know about things you haven't experienced in your own life.

At the very least for struggling emerging writers, struggling to break into the publishing world has powerful resonance possibilities for metafictive stories.

What inspires our stories, our characters and their struggles, inspires our reading interests is one general area that I regularly question. Dreams and nightmares, wishes, desires, wants, to name a few. What about our inspirations are conducive to reader resonance? Identity disorders is one narrow source area for developing resonant internal struggles. Anyone have others to add?

On the other hand, up till recently, a lot of my characters were in the military...but lately, I've avoided that, because I felt I knew nothing about actually being in the military despite my research. Nor is this the only subject I've taken to avoiding.

Either way, the stranger injected into a (static or a dynamic) community stirs up conflict.

Personally, I love this motif. A lot of classic stories come from this. SHANE, for instance. LORD JIM. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, if I remember right. Any version of MARCO POLO's travels, spaghetti westerns use this idea.

My biggest weakness as a writer is understanding and incorporating appealing features that influence reader resonance. I've found that shocking events are a good, old standby, violence and such, but feel that shock value can be trite and perceived as trickery, too.

I've worked through plot, character, setting, discourse, theme, tone, and rhetoric, leaving only the resonance element of story to get a handle on.

Attachment function as an interpersonal human activity seems to me to be an encompassing avenue for influencing reader resonance (attachment involvement in a story).

The seven modes by which characters interact that I've identified in stories include coodetermination, cooperation, coordination, contention, conflict, confrontation, and conflagration. Antagonism's inciting problems and purposes also relate to the seven interaction modes.

Add to interactions the nature of interpersonal relationships; dependent, codependent, interdependent, intradependent, and independent, which don't remain in one mode, but cycle through changing character stances and relational positions.

My most recent story stalled until I could get a handle on the protagonist's personal motives, stakes, and incitements. I'd written a first draft and went through innumerable running revisions, but it lacked for an internal incitement, which I see as a way for creating effective reader resonance. I developed an internal incitement related to the external incitement and the imaginative premises in how he was out of place and feeling excluded from the circumstances, until he's needed to address the external incitement, which is early on. Then, called to action, he rises reluctantly to the occasion. Exclusion remains a feature of his struggles to surmount setbacks, obstacles, and resistance thrown in his way.

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I wonder if I could possibly match that kind of pain...or even if I need to match it.

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Examples...oh, well...back in my distant childhood, I had a friend who moved away, then moved back four years later, but didn't seem to be my friend anymore, in fact seemed to join with the bullies who tormented me. I didn't think the matter haunted me any...it was certainly unpleasant but not a big deal, and I thought (and think) it's behind me...but, much later, when I was working on an Internet Fan Fiction, I remembered it and bestowed it on the lead character to shore up the motivation.

Broken down to discrete terms, protagonist is pro anti-agony. Pro a prefix meaning championing, an immediate connection to the hero concept of story. Anti another prefix, meaning opposition, the hallmark of conflict. Without opposition there are no resistances, obstacles, or setbacks. Life is a breeze without opposition. Is there such a thing? Agony, there's the rub. Championing opposition to agony. Friction, turmoil, struggle, pain, unrequited desire, unfulfilled need, wants unattended; internal struggles. Contention, conflict, confrontation, conflagration; external struggles.

In my ongoing studies of advices from accomplished authors, writing professors, agents, editors, publishers, and even emerging writers, there's very little agreement on what makes a good story good. Excepting one, internal conflict. Internal conflicts are the agonies we carry and share in common and can hope to resolve. We can't fix anyone else, we might be able to fix ourselves. And in those internal conflicts and our attempts to fix them is to my mind the key to reader sympathy and resonance.

The vast majority of successful authors have demonstrated this. There are exceptions like Poe and Dickenson, whose lives seemed to be perpetually haunted by ghosts and demons, but most appear to write of life's trials in retrospect.

All of us have had a disability or dysfunction of one sort or another - some greater than others. No two people share the same talents or circumstances in life, and that qualifies my previous statement.

It might be better to step away from the details somewhat. I would contend anyone who's experienced fear, worry, sadness, and the other basic emotions inherently have what it takes to be successful fiction writers.

I disagree that experience of a situation is a prerequisite to writing about it. It should be especially obvious to people drawn to speculative fiction. You just have to have had enough "mundane" experiences in you life to have experienced the normal human emotional span. The overwhelming majority of adults have.

As writers, we're free to create situations and use a combination of our mundane experiences (which have produced strong emotions in us) and our imaginations to trigger similar imagination and emotions in a reader through the portrayal of a fictional character.

How many writers have actually been in a car chase, shot someone, been shot, traveled off the planet, been totally alienated? But how many have chased or pursued something, hurt someone, been hurt, travelled somewhere, or felt loneliness? Ditto for readers. Sure, some research will be required at times, but to be prohibited from writing effectively about a shooting victim for not having been shot is too extreme.

My point was that experience is the key. Not necessarily that exact experience, but experience in general. One doesn't necessarily have to be married and have children to write about a family's relations. If someone had grown up in a family similar to what he/she is writing, this could be enough. I suppose TV, movies, or research could be a reference, but I question whether a writer could achieve the depth that someone who has lived it could express. This is what I mean by perspective.

Stephen King wrote about alcoholism in The Shining. I'm not sure if he was an active alcoholic while he was writing it, though the timeline would suggest to me that he was. I suppose being in the midst of it gave him perspective as well.