Now that's what I call writing: Tom Stoppard

Before I depart for a few days to do intensive editing on my manuscript Undertow, I'll leave you with a quote from Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which, to me, sums up nicely why so much of fiction consists of bad things happening to people.

The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Guildenstern: Is that what people want?

The Player: It's what we do.