Give people a model they can replicate and characters to emulate.

you were my student I’d ask: “Why is it that so many successful plots begin at the family plot?” Because for most of us—especially among young people—our worst fear is of losing our parents. If you create a world where one or both parents have died, you’re creating characters that have survived your reader’s worst fears. Your reader will respect

Truisms

You’re forced to realize your identity was a choice, and then to choose another. But you know this next strategy will never have the same passion as the one you’d chosen as a child. Now you’re especially aware that it’s a choice. And you know it, too, will likely fade.

Films can cut or dissolve or fade to. Comics simply move from panel to panel. But in prose, how do you resolve one aspect of the story and begin the next?

So if you were my student, I’d ask you, “Who’s telling this? Where are they telling it? And why are they telling it?”

“Them’s be the big leagues.”

Armistead Maupin invented Mona’s Law. It states that of a great lover, a great job, and a great apartment, in life you can have one. At most you can have two of the three. But you will never, ever have all three at the same time.

For Scarlett O’Hara it was, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” In that way, a chorus is also a coping mechanism.