We don’t fall in love with appearances. Books are the greatest example of that. We fall in love with characters’ actions and feelings; to specify, we didn’t fall in love with Mr. Darcy because he was tall and handsome. The same goes for Xaden, Rhysand, and Gilbert Blythe. We fell in love with their hearts. If you are the kind of reader who has ever missed the bus because a paragraph physically would not let you look up, then you’ve probably already experienced the particular affliction I have just attempted to describe. The following is a compiled list of authors who have created these beloved characters’ hearts.
1. Homer
We have to start at the beginning, because Homer basically invented the idea that stories could break your heart on purpose. Three thousand years later, The Iliad still has the audacity to make you cry for Hector, a man who is, technically, on the villain’s side. Homer understood something that a lot of modern writers still haven’t figured out: grief and glory are the same emotion wearing different coats. Every war epic, every hero’s journey, every “protagonist-with-a-concerning-amount-of-hubris learns humility” trope owes Homer non-existent royalties.
2. Shakespeare
I resisted Shakespeare for years the way you resist a sauce everyone insists you’ll love and then you go back and realize it’s delicious to the point that you feel the need to apologize to everyone you refused it to. Shakespeare understood everyone’s hidden motives and passion, whether it was a reflection of those living in his time or in the future. Jealousy that curdles into murder, ambition that eats its own creator alive, and grief so total it makes a prince talk to a skull are all cornerstones of the tropes we all love and know nowadays.
3. Charles Dickens
Nobody does worldbuilding finer than how Dickens executes it; every orphan, lawyer, and pickpocket turns out to be connected in some devastating way in his sprawling, tangled, city-sized novels. But underneath those serenely crafted worlds is a writer who was genuinely angry about how the poor and the forgotten were treated, smuggling that anger into stories so entertaining that all of London read them anyway. The slightly annoying, yet greatly admirable thing about Dickens is that he makes you fall in love with a character first, rather coincidentally for your typical high school summer reading assignment, and then breaks your heart with what the world did to them.
4. Zora Neale Hurston
And now we arrive at the writer who lives permanently in my heart. Their Eyes Were Watching God was an absolute embodiment of the word “lovely.” Hurston writes the way water moves; every sentence has its own speed and sound. Instead of following a “respectable” writing style, she used her own rural, American South dialect, demonstrating the vernacular she wasn’t afraid to show to the world. Janie’s whole journey toward becoming a woman who belongs to herself is written with such lyricism that you feel your own posture change while reading it. I have never recovered from the pear tree, and I don’t ever intend to.
5. Toni Morrison
Morrison taught literature how to haunt. Beloved is one of the only novels I have ever had to close and sit down on the floor because I needed a moment to remember how to breathe normally. Morrison writes trauma and memory and love with the controlled poetic prowess of a literary master. She has the gift to make language do the emotional work that plain narration never could.
6. Gabriel García Márquez
His language is lush, dream-like, and drunk on beauty. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, time shifts, ghosts wander through the kitchen, and somehow it all feels more true than realism ever could. If you loved the way Hurston makes the ordinary feel mythic, García Márquez will show you how the mythic can be ordinary.
Of course, I could keep going. But a list has to stop somewhere, and these are the top six who have been the absolute cheerleaders for my own literary journey. Writing, to me, feels like an enormous tree. Some writers are thunderstorms—like those listed above—the people whose work is what other writers model their own small and endearing droplets of water off of. Those newer droplets of morning dew are writers like me, doing what dew does before disappearing into the bark by midmorning. But the tree doesn’t measure the water it receives. It simply grows because someone keeps showing up to water it.
I think that’s the greatest thing these writers understood when crafting these pieces for the sake of writing. They never did it for the sake of the world.
About the Author
Soeun Lee is an intern at Write the World and a senior at Tenafly High School. Her writing has won prizes from the John Locke Essay Competition, the Harvard International Review, the JFK Essay Competition, the NCTE Awards, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and The New York Times, among others. In addition to her published work at The Apprentice Writer and her two published peer-reviewed research papers, she also holds roles at six publications and a publishing house. Soeun joined Write the World as a young writer in 2022 and harbors a fondness for mellifluous, sesquipedalian words.
