Where's the drama?

A while back, I met a young arborist with whom I contracted to do some tree work on my property. During the course of the engagement, he related the odd story of how he met his wife. One day while searching his own name on the Internet, he came across a girl who had the exact same name. This happenstance led to a meeting, courtship, and finally marriage.

This, I had to admit, was a rare circumstance indeed. After they married, the word somehow got out, and the couple was invited to audition for appearances on a few television shows, including Good Morning America and the Oprah Winfrey show. I found this to be quite interesting, and probed the young man for more details.

After a short while, I discovered that the whole story was simply that they both had the same first and last names. There wasn't anything more. "What's the punch line?" I asked. He stammered and said, "What do you mean?" I tried to explain that for the story to be interesting to a TV audience, there had to be something more. "If there's no drama, the audience won't become involved in the story." "Well, we fell in love," he offered. The bottom line was that they didn't make it through the auditions.

Writers, in order to make their stories interesting to readers, have to look for, and properly describe, the drama. This is the sine qua non for reader interest. Ordinary events—things that happen regularly in the normal course of human living—are generally uninteresting to an audience. People see these things every day in their lives, and don't really want to invest time reading your work to see more of it. They want to escape the humdrum of daily living, which is generally boring.

In fiction, a writer can create plausible drama (the operative word is plausible) that will be interesting. But what about non-fiction? Sometimes the drama is hiding right under your nose. Did your character suffer? Was he/she betrayed by a friend or relative? Did he/she have to do something that was morally or ethically repugnant? Did they suffer extraordinarily bad luck? I think you get the idea.

The bottom line, as I told the arborist, is that there has to be more to the story than a mere coincidence. Audiences live to be entertained, and immersed in your story, and drama is the vehicle to do just that.