If you’ve ever finished a good novel, you’ve probably noticed something curious. After a few years, the plot starts to fade. You might remember that it was a mystery, or a romance, or an adventure. You remember how it ended. You remember whether you enjoyed it. But what you remember most are the people.
Not necessarily the hero. Sometimes it’s the old man who lived next door. The waitress who appeared in two chapters. The best friend who always knew the right thing to say. The grandmother who could make you laugh with a single sentence. Some characters have a way of following us long after we’ve closed the book.
I’ve been thinking about that lately because I’ve found myself looking up people I knew forty years ago. Old classmates. Coworkers from jobs I had in my twenties. People I haven’t seen in decades.
It’s funny what happens. I don’t remember every conversation we had. I don’t remember what we did on any particular Tuesday. But I remember them. Their laugh. Their sense of humour. The way they carried themselves. The little things that made them unmistakably themselves.
It made me realize that the people we remember in fiction aren’t all that different from the people we remember in life. They’re rarely the loudest. They’re rarely the most dramatic. They’re simply the ones who felt real.
I think that’s why I love writing stories filled with ordinary people living ordinary lives—at least until extraordinary circumstances find them. The detective may solve the case, or the hero may save the day, but it’s often the people around them who make the world feel worth saving. Those are the characters who give a story its heart.
And maybe that’s true outside of books, too. If you stop for a moment, I suspect you could think of someone you haven’t seen in years. A teacher. A neighbour. A coworker. Someone who wandered into your life for a while and quietly left it better than they found it. They probably have no idea they still occupy a little corner of your memory. But they do.
Maybe that’s why the best stories stay with us. Not because they remind us of adventures we’ll never have…
…but because they remind us of people we’ll never quite forget.
— Mark