Novels can be crippled by a too-weak or too-strong counter-narrative

I have learned a lot about writing novels this year. In fact, I can actually enumerate some of these. By far the most important one is that in a novel, people need a reason to be the way they are.

This is a sharp difference from real life. In real life people do not need a reason to be how they are. In real life people simply are, and the origins of thei…