My muse hides in the basement, sitting in the dark, smoking cigars and swearing a lot. He’s an unruly chap who doesn’t like to be disturbed unless he deems it essential, which he often doesn’t. Sometimes, to hear his musings, I have to hide in the shadows, pen and paper in hand, silently writing down his ideas as he grumbles them in his sleep.

But his words are gold, so I listen carefully, plucking every nugget I can swipe from him.

See what I did there?

The secret was threaded into those words, hidden in the shadows. Did you catch it? Don’t be too hard on yourself if you didn’t. It is elusive. Sneaky and hard to find.

The book publishing industry is a 10 billion dollar a year business, and the movie industry collects 77 billion dollars annually. So, why do people spend so much of their hard-earned dollars taking in stories?

Is it just for entertainment? Is the answer that simple?

No. It’s more than that.

Way more.

To find that out, you only have to look as far as Star Wars (the original movies), one of the most iconic IPs in history. 

Star Wars is iconic because of the hidden gems inside of it. It was one of the all time favorites to millions of human beings for many excellent reasons, only one of them being that it was entertaining.

Let’s take a moment, together, to understand what made those movies so memorable.

Early in the Empire Strikes Back, Luke ends up stuck in a cave, dangling from the ceiling, his feet frozen in place by a wampa and the wampa was eating his tauntaun when he regained consciousness. He struggles to free himself, but his feet are frozen to the ceiling. He sees his lightsaber but cannot reach it. He goes silent, closing his eyes, gathering his strength to use the force better. He opens his eyes, stretches out his hand, and concentrates on pulling his saber free, using the force. The saber begins to move a little and he eventually pulls it free, turning it on, cutting himself loose and the wampa sees him. It gets up and charges him, so Luke cuts off the beast’s arm and runs from the cave.

But that story is about more than just Luke Skywalker and one of his first successful uses of the force. Sure, it’s about that, where the story is concerned, but it’s about way more than ‘just’ that.

As humans, we often find ourselves stuck in dark, damp caves and sometimes, we have our own wampas, in life, snacking on our two-legged snow horses. We struggle to free ourselves from that cave, desperately needing to figure out how to disarm the monsters of our past, or our present, so we can escape back into not being stuck in that cave. 

The moral of that story is to collect ourselves and use the natural forces within ourselves or our lives to disarm the monsters in our lives. The writer of that tale was trying to tell us that the answers to our problems often lie within us. We have to find them.

Which is often not easy. Life is hard, but the answers we need are there. We have to quiet our minds and find them.

This is the real reason people read stories. To find answers to the problems they face. Authors that know what their doing, know how to present the answers to our problems in very subtle ways, hiding them in plain sight like gold nuggets for us to find.