Generating Appeal in writing

I feel like every time I create and finish a new story, I learn one or two new things about the very elusive art of writing. One of the most elusive of the things that I have started to understand recently is appeal, appeal exists in drawing just as much as it does in writing. Even if you learn all the rules and you know your grammar and story structure, the thing you write just might not be interesting to people you are trying to reach. The actual content may be boring, but more likely is that there is no emotional growth or emotional connection with your characters.

Why do you read a story?

Did you read wizard of Oz because of its flawless story structure? Or was it because you felt connected to the main character and her ambition to want more out of her life, when in reality she had everything she needed? Great stories have these kernels of truth within them, look at any of your favorite story and you will see that the author is trying to communicate one simple idea through a complex narrative.

To show a better example of how I finally started to apply this thinking we can look at a story that I recently wrote to be a short comic book.

I wanted to write a story about wizards, so I started to write a story about wizards, and it turned out very badly for one reason, it had no emotional content. There were lots of cool wizards and fight scenes and some kissing even, but none of my characters really WANTED anything and none of them grew or learned anything, most of all, I didn't teach my audience anything. Someone who read that story would walk away looking at the world in the same way, and they would be unmoved.

So I went back to square one and I decided that the wizards were incidental, and before I could even touch the fun wizard fighting I needed a kernel. And this is where is got difficult because this is where you have to look inward and ask what do you care about? Whats eating you up inside and what will help people?

So after a week of bashing my head on a brick wall and trying to be deep I finally realized that I wanted to talk about parental abuse and how an older child deals with it. I wanted my main character to learn that it is not okay to run away from his problems, that he needed to stay and fight. not for his sake but for the sake of his family.

And then I wrote all the stuff about wizards on top of that truth, stopping frequently to make sure all of my decisions reflected the message I wanted to tell people.