When I got into fandom, back when mammoths walked the earth[1], the “literary community” looked down on “genre fiction”[2], and among the major criticisms were lack of character development and growth. Then the New Wave came in, and we got all of that.[3]
That’s what I’m writing. I’m not writing “character-driven stories”[4], I’m writing stories with characters and plot. All of my people *matter*. I have very few background NPCs, as it were. I write the way I live. This may come as a shock, I understand, but you, my readers, are people, too, with your own lives and cares. Why should all the people who aren’t the PoV characters not have lives, as well?
I also craft my stories. There’s the old line for writers, “write what you know”, and I’ve said before, my followup is that if you’re going to add what you don’t know, do research, preferably from primary sources. I’ve mentioned that when I was working on 11,000 Years, there were times when I was stuck for hours, and sometimes days, on names.
I’m currently working on a story set about 400 or so years from now, and one major secondary character gets pregnant and intends to use what is then well-known technology, an artificial womb. Other people have written about them, especially Lois McMaster Bujold. But I spent a week or two trying to find information as to when in the pregnancy the fetus could be transferred to the AW. [5] Then, since a later pregnancy will be disastrous, I spent more weeks trying to figure out what, given that advanced technology, could still result in disaster.
Details. I’m working on as much realism as I can manage. I push current tech, and thinking, and knowledge, as far as I can, without breaking what we know.
I think all that makes them better stories. I want you to care about my people as much as I do.
[1] You young’uns think dogs and cats shedding, you don’t know nothin. When the mammoths shed in the spring, we needed rakes and shovels…
[2] They still do look down on us. But then, they’ve lost a lot of readership, to where some writers (me included) refer to what they write as lit-fic.
[3] It’s like the old jokes about intelligence – if a computer can do it, it’s not Really Intelligence.
[4] I’m reminded of the Christian religious leader who claimed “you cannot win salvation by works, only by faith.” Um, no, if you were the Samaritan and walked on by, you lost it. A person, once they hit 18 or so, will not change, they’ll only become more like that, unless some major event hits them over the head with a cluex4. The plot allows events to affect the characters, and push them to change. Without that, nope.