Relevance

So last night, Baby Girl came into my room and wanted to watch American Idol. This despite the fact that I was 1) on the phone, and 2) hacking up a lung. So how she heard a thing, I have no idea. Anyway, it was something they call "60s Night" in which singers had to pick a song from the 60s to sing. And the judges--particularly the snarky Simon--kept criticizing these singers because they were not "relevant." At least that's what I got out of it in between talking to my best friend, then sister, then my mother . . . and hacking up said lung. It wasn't that the songs were old. It was that the singers couldn't make the audience relate to them.

Relevance.

I have a book which has an opening story arc in Darfur. Nearly every book I write mentions the main character praying. Mentions Buddhism. In ROCK MY WORLD, one of the rock groups even collects food for the homeless at its concerts. Mark Terry writes about a Homeland Security troubleshooter. Can't get much more relevant than that. Edie Ramer has written a book about women coming to grips with breast cancer. Relevant.

But there's more to relevance than politics or religion or health issues. There's EMOTIONAL relevance. At a book's heart, I think most readers want to relate to the main character. If the main character is so removed from the lives of nearly everyone else, then the book will lack relevance. In other words, I have critiqued books in which the heroine loses everything that has ever mattered to her in her entire life. And doesn't react. And the author will say, "Well, Susie Q is a very tough person. She just wouldn't react to it." And that may and well be true. But if you haven't drawn Susie Q well enough for us to even begin to fathom that, then she will cease to be relevant.

In Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven, when Lily has sex after losing her breast, the scar feels hideous to her, and her lover kisses it--every inch of it. I tried to invoke EVERY person, not just women, who has ever, in this appearance-oriented culture, made love with an enormous sense of insecurity--to invoke the relevance of a scar, or being "imperfect" and its relation to our sexuality.

There isn't a person alive who isn't touched by love, laughter, small moments and large moments of emotional beauty . . . and by loss, illness, pain, and eventually . . . death. We're all going out in a pine box, folks. Or, judging by my recent post on fears, a LOT of us are getting cremated. But the bottom line is this quote from the Dalai Lama:

Under the bright sun, many of us are gathered together with different languages, different styles of dress, even different faiths. However, all of us are the same in being humans, and we all uniquely have the thought of I, and we´re all the same in wanting happiness and in wanting to avoid suffering.
~Tenzin Gyatso

FIND that element in your stories and no matter what you write about, your words will be relevant.

Thoughts?