I have no title

A girl in Florida recently underwent a heart transplant. Before the operation, she survived for two months without a heart inside her body. The doctors kept her alive. Despite all the problems with the health and medical professions in this country (chiefly, the problems of for-profit service industry and insurance middlemen), the determination of those doctors to keep the girl alive, aware, conscious, with no heartbeat in her chest, while waiting for a viable donor heart, is nothing short of a gift.

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Characters in stories are real, as real as movie actors, as real as commercial actors, as real as you and I in our day-to-day lives. Characters in stories suffer for a reason: so we can observe and say, "I'm glad my life's not that bad." By necessity, characters in stories suffer. They embody all aspects of our own actual existence so that we can experience our own flaws, failures, shortcomings, our own tiny moments of light, hope, success, and triumph through another's experience of them. In that way story characters are sacrificial, whether they are aware of it or not. By writing them, we give them life. By witnessing them, we share in the experience of that life.