I don’t know what made me thought March of the Penguins was going to have a great story. No matter what a penguin’s life is like, there was something about the ads that made me think I was going to care what happened to these penguins. I didn’t think it was going to be just a documentary. Actually, I’ve seen documentaries that do the story thing better.

So, I’m watching March of the Penguins, and I’m thinking, You know, this is cool video footage and all. But this would make a much better story if they followed the journey of one penguin couple, Fred and Freda, as they meet and raise a family. Then, quite by accident, I found an article on Mary Lynn Mercer’s site that essentially said the same thing. I love it when that happens. It makes me think I’m not so crazy after all.

I’ve seen beginning writers make this same mistake, and I myself may have made it in some far-off repressed memory. If I looked back through my archives, I can probably find an instance of it. The error comes in thinking that a story is more poignant if you talk about hundreds or thousands of people. If California fell into the Pacific Ocean, killing thousands, that would be tragic. It would be sensational. But it would not be poignant.

Thousands of people is just a statistic. If you want to drive the point home, to make us care what happens to those people, tell us the story of one of them. Give us a protagonist we can identify with. Then lead us through his journey. That will make us care.

This is the problem with March of the Penguins. We see the struggle, the danger and death, the pain and loss, but we don’t experience it, because we have no protagonist, no hero, no one to root for. If you want to write stories that matter, talk about one person, not hundreds.

-TimK