Total Strangers

Why are we so fascinated with stars? Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova are total strangers. Yet millions of people feel like they know them and care about their successes and failures - perhaps even more than they care about their neighbor.

Answer: It's a kind of magic. A trick of the storytelling trade.

First you need a character. He or she needs enough depth to seem real, seem like a real person. Then you wave your magic wand, performing all sorts of tricks to make that character "sympathetic." This simply means that you do things to make the audience side with your character. Then, to glue your reader to your novel (or your viewer to the movie), you cast a spell on the reader to make him identify with the character. Then provide an emotional touchstone and make your character want something. Really want something. Want it very, very much.

Zap. Reader is hooked. He relates to a figment of the imagination as if it were a real person. The character is nothing but blotches of ink on a page, but the reader is emotionally involved in the image of the character you have painted.

Then just send your character off in pursuit of whatever he wants, and torture the reader every step of the way with all the trials and tribulations the character goes through.

Notice that you have all the ingredients of a story in an athletic contest, especially one like tennis, in which the focus is on a single player in one-on-one competition with another for something both want very much. A lot of money and a shiny trophy. Like Indiana Jones, they are in hot pursuit of the Holy Grail. This is perfect protagonist-antagonist action. And there are many opportunities for giving us an emotional touchstone with some photo of "tennis rage."

True, these are real people, not mere characters.

Or are they? Most of us never lay eyes on them in person. They are but flickering flashes of light on a TV screen. We are relating to their IMAGE. Their public persona. We really know less about them than we know about the fictitious characters in a novel.

Hollywood learned long ago that stars are selling handles for their products, so they cultivate (and exaggerate) interest in them. Well, not really. Real people aren't always interesting. You'll learn that fast if you try to write a novel with a main character who's a little too real.

Boring.

Like, say, Pete Sampras.

So, the industry has ways of getting stars to put on a public persona that's - well, interesting. Mr. Sampras wouldn't do that, and I don't blame him.

Mr. Agassi gave it up long ago. In fact older players generally do.

I suspect that's because they find it a little dehumanizing. That public persona is just a caricature, a cartoon figure - that is, flat, without human depth. A human being is so much more. I suppose they come to realize that we are relating to their image, not them, so that they remain complete strangers to us.