Riddle me this: 

I am tailored using the finest materials. I am skillfully made, twisted and manipulated to instill emotions in people. I can make grown men and women weep, laugh, inspire and angry. The farther they know me, the deeper they fall to the abyss of no return. I am unforgettable, daunting and mysterious.

What am I? 

A great write. 

A/N: I tried. 

I wrote a book recently and published it on Amazon. It put me to sleep. Seriously.

My mother read it, my sister read it, my cousin read it, my brother read it, my friends read it...and they thought it was great.

So I honestly don't know. Write what you feel; develop your characters. If your characters seem to have lives of their own and just...do their own thing, chances are, you've got something going there.

Great Write is purely a matter of opinion, and I know that what peaks my interest will be an absolute bore to others, so.. With that said, here's my two cents.

Great writing to me is something I can relate to, I can feel- something that feels enough like home to speak to me, but enough like the unknown to keep me reading.

For this reason, I enjoy stories of ordinary people thrown into fictional situations. A regular guy at school thrown into a dimension of dragons and knights. A girl working at a café suddenly finding herself in the middle of an intergalactic war.

The fantastical being coped with by the ordinary. I can feel for these characters as the boy tries to learn to wield a sword without a Youtube tutorial or the girl comes to terms with all of the new technology and alien creatures around her.

Or even, supernatural things entirely but dealing with ordinary problems. A goblin who deals with depression. An extra-terrestrial space princess who has insecurities.

Being able to see the characters in books who were like me then thrown into this world of fiction, gives me the sense of anyone having the possibility to find that fantastical journey. Maybe I could find myself in another dimension like that. If I did, what would I do?

Seeing other worldly characters facing the same problems I do makes me feel like I'm not alone in my problems. If a cyborg worries about conforming to society, maybe it's not bad that I do, too.

If there is no semblance of something I can feel for or relate to, I probably won't like the story as much. It won't speak to me, and I won't listen as well.

"Great white? It's a shark, isn't it? Don't go swimming in Australia." He sat back, confident in the accuracy of his words. He'd been around, he'd lived. He knew these things. In his mind at least.

I felt, rather than heard, the breath expel from my body. He was exasperating beyond belief. He annoyed the shit out of me with his over-confident replies. "That's not what I said." My words were careful, measured, while I silently screamed that he was an idiot. "I said, great WRITE."

He sniffed abruptly, a loud and intrusive sound. I envisioned the snot retracing its way back up his wide nostrils, a reverse waterfall of mucus. I shuddered involuntarily. 

"Great write? It makes no sense."

I paused for just a moment before releasing my words in a steady and regulated order, stacking them nose-to-tail against one another. "Great write. It means, how do you place words on paper in a manner that translates to almost-genius? A genre of excellence, if you will."

"Hmmph." 

I watched him as he thought, his paradigms of thinking tracing their way across his lined face, as clearly visible to me as an 80's t-shirt motto glimpsed on a nightclub dance floor.

Finally, he turned back to me, an irritatingly smug expression pasted across his aged countenance. His faded blue eyes twinkled. "It's simple. Transcribe the unedited words directly from your heart and someone else's heart will hear them and understand them." 

I didn't look at him, instead busying myself with collecting the unused cutlery from the table and stacking the placemats together. The old bastard had won again.

@MsH