You can't be a constructive artist or a potent storyteller unless you care. You have to care, you have to care for the characters and what happens or might happen to them, you have to care about the audience and the world that you share. This is what makes good dramatic writing so difficult, because it's not terribly cool or hip or filthy to care. We live in a situation of irony in which, for many of of us, caring seems like it will only make things worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if you don’t care. Storytellers are society's only really antidote to this common garden-brand psychosis. - Billy Marshall Stoneking

Every dramatic story that matters starts and ends with the characters. Writing the story is a focused and meditative process of entering into the most profound relationships with the characters in the story. It is the journey a writer makes in his/her quest to love the characters. What does it mean to LOVE your characters? It means that they become the object of your ultimate concern, that their presence is manifest and noted, that their views are known and respected, that their weaknesses and fears and failings are treated with understanding and empathy, and that their needs are listened to and acted upon with some degree of indulgence. Under such profound care, how could a character not flourish?