Bulding Character from Life: what happened when Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford in 2005

Image via Wikipedia Hoover Tower, Stanford, campus where Steve Jobs spoke

Jean Purcell

Twitter @opinaripeople

Twitter @OpineBooksCafe_NEW 

_______________________________

Fiction writers must create and develop believable characters. The protagonist, especially, must have flaws, weaknesses, fears...to form identification by the reader.

      
Steve Jobs, who died after a long illness, created Apple, the high-tech business known all over the world. He was not afraid to tell about a tough time in his life. Speaking about a time of apparent failure, Steve Jobs told Stanford University graduates: "Sometime,  life is going to throw a brick at you."

The line was followed--oddly, I thought--by laughter. You can find that speech on YouTube and listen for the laughter rippling over the audience after that line.

Surely some of those students knew exactly what Steve Jobs meant; they had already had to dodge or recover from a few "bricks" that had come their way. Maybe some who laughed like dark humor, after the fact. When we get out of the dark, we can look back and laugh sometimes. 

Fiction writers know that good stories involve some "bricks" being thrown, usually at main characters. Protagonists cannot be shown as jumping to the right conclusions all the time. They cannot have all the answers, do the right thing always, or never fail to make the correct or anticipated responses.

Some authors are able to bring the release of tears to our eyes, making words swim on pages before us. That, we know, means the story is moving us somewhere deep within ourselves. 

I hope that if a brick has already come your way in this New Year 2012 that you know you will somehow recover. You can even be stronger for refusing to give up, to allow that brick to destroy you. Just listen on YouTube to what Steve Jobs said. Whatever his beliefs, he was given ability, in this life, to push forward and give to graduates who were about to learn more about life outside than inside the university.  

That is no joke.

Tweet this


Follow @OpineCafeBlog

Karen Kingsbury, Best-selling Christian Author of Unlocked, about Autism

by Jean Purcell

jean.purcell@opinebooks.com

If you have not yet read any of Karen Kingsbury's books, then you and I are in the same boat. I do not usually gravitate toward bestselling fiction. However, I want to pass this info along to you, and to make a note to myself, about Karen Kingsbury's NYT best-seller: Unlocked. The author's name appears in a list I published earlier, of best-selling Christian books of 2010.

Author Karen Kingsbury/PRWeb

     Unlocked came about from the author's experience, as many books do. Kingsbury observed the struggles of a young friend considered to be "autistic"; she saw his condition as a "locked in" situation. Her close proximity to autism issues led her to learn more about autism and what was called "the autistic community"--parents, extended family, friends of family, and doctors and teachers.     

      If you want to know more about autism and the sub-topic, very important, of bullying, you can go to YouTube for "special behind-the-scenes insight into the writing of the book and Kingsbury's personal connection to the disease, through family friends who inspired Unlocked" (PRWeb,  Thursday, October 6, 2011).  

     I'll ask for the book at my local library in Howard County, Maryland, where my husband Jim and I borrow fiction books. Unlocked is also available through brick-and-mortar stores and on-line booksellers.