Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
Interpretation
Fears guide our curiosity about the future, both in life and storytelling.
Karen Thompson Walker suggests that fears serve a dual purpose in life and narrative by drawing our focus to a critical question: 'What will happen next?' This inquiry reflects our natural instinct to seek resolution and understanding amidst uncertainty, whether in the context of our personal lives or through the narratives we engage with in literature.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of confronting fears.
A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.
Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.
In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.
Jesus was much more interested in the quality of the people's response to him than in the quantity of the crowd.
Our Founding Fathers understood that our country would survive and flourish if our Nation was committed to good character and an unyielding dedication to liberty and justice for all.
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
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