At a daycare center in Texas, children were playing outside. One of the children was Jessica Mc Clure. She was 18 months old. Her mother, who worked at the daycare center, was watching the children. Suddenly Jessica fell and disappeared. Jessica's mother screamed and ran to her.

    A well was in the yard of the center. The well was only eight inches across and a rock always covered it. But children had moved the rock. When Jessica fell, she fell right into the well.

    Jessica's mother reached inside the well, but she couldn't feel Jessica. She dialed 911 for help. Men from the fire department arrived. They discovered that Jessica was about 20 feet down in the well. For the next hour the men talked and planned Jessica's rescue.

    “We can't go down into the well,”they said.“It's too narrow. So, we're going to drill a hole next to the well. Then we'll drill a tunnel across to Jessica. When we reach her, we'll bring her through the tunnel and up through our hole.”

    The men began to drill the hole at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, October 14, 1987. The men had a difficult job; they were drilling through solid rock. During her days in the well, Jessica sometimes asked for her mother. Sometimes she slept, sometimes she cried and sometimes she sang.

    All over the world, people waited for news of Jessica. Everyone worried about her.

    At 8 p.m. on Friday, October 16, men reached Jessica and brought her up from the well. She was soon sent to hospital. Jessica was dirty, hungry, thirsty and tired. Her feet and forehead were badly injured. But Jessica was alive.

    After Jessica's rescue, one of the rescuers made a metal cover for the well, saying,“To Jessica, with love from all of us.”

    On a recent visit to the Museum of Modem Art with a friend and her daughter, wandering through the museum's exhibits, I was struck by how often my friend's 13-year-old daughter asked us to take photos of her with her smart phone in front of the artwork. Then, she gazed at the photos which she would then post on Instagram, Snapchat and all the rest. She was not the only person who was doing this; it seemed everyone was busy taking photos of themselves "experiencing" the museum.

    This is by no means a criticism of my friend's daughter or anyone else. What was concerning, at least to me, was that in between being photographed and posting, my friend's daughter had no interest in the artwork, a fact which didn't seem to matter or have anything to do with wanting to post herself as someone enjoying the experience.

    When I was her age, I had no interest in going to museums either. Having no interest in art at her age (and any age) is completely normal. But what is disturbing is how much of a young person's energy these days goes into creating an image of the life they're living and the character they "are" in that life. While creating a self-image has always been a big part of growing up and figuring out our identity, social media seems to have changed the rules of the game. Social media has not just increased the pressure and possibility of creating a self-generated(自我创造的) self-image, but also distorted(歪曲) the process through which we become who we are. Young people now seem to be creating an image of who they are in place of becoming who they are, posting their life rather than living it.

    Social media has turned life and its experiences into an exercise in narcissism(自恋，自我陶醉). No matter what the experience is actually about, it becomes about you, the person who is living it. A concert is not about the music, a restaurant not about the food and a sport event not about the sport; it's all about you, the doer, and what the event says about you. As a result the more we use life create an identity, the more distant from life we feel. Instead of being part of it, we feel as if we have to keep generating new life material.

    I hope the next time you post your story, pause for a moment and experience where you are, feel what it feels like to live what you're living without using life for your benefit, or for anything at all. Just live, without the narrative(叙述). While you may feel this practice is a threat to your identity, causing you to miss a chance to prove your value, in fact, the benefit will far outweigh any loss it brings.

    What's the most important thing in a piece of writing? Is it the story, the characters, the description, or the style? Obviously, you can't choose only one. A great work succeeds in combining all of them in a great mix, producing a wonderful work.

    In most cases, you're better at one writing element over the rest, and working on your strengths will work to your advantage. Building characters, however, is important to your writing. It's not to be ignored no matter what your case is. So, how do you achieve that?

Make Them Real

    This is probably one of the most common pieces of writing advice: make your characters believable. What does it really mean? It means that your characters need to be there for a reason, not just for pushing the story forward. He/She has a real life, with his/her own fears and dreams, and you have to show this. Your characters don't need to be typical to be believable. The unusual ones are even more interesting, but it's your job to make your readers relate to them.

Understand Human Psychology

    To build great characters, you'll need to understand people's psychology: what are they thinking about, what are they feeling and experiencing, and why are they doing what they are doing? Get behind the obvious. Be in the backstage with them. Sit them in a chair and let them talk away. If you truly listen, you will learn.

Be your character

    When you immerse (使沉浸) yourself in your writing, you get lost in that world and you start living in it. This is when the magic happens and you become your character. By putting yourself in your character's shoes, you allow yourself to experience what you're writing about first-hand. The more it feels real to you, the more the readers will feel the same, too.

    About 15 years ago, I taught A Problem from Hell, a book on genocides (大屠杀), to a group of 18- and 19-year-olds in a mid-west university in the US. In my class there was a young man who had spent his boyhood in Bosnia as NATO bombed his hometown. My other students, amazed by his connection to the genocide in the textbook, asked him what it was like to grow up in a war-zone. "A pretty normal childhood as you had here," he said. "We played cards inside a lot, and when there was no bombing we kicked a ball in the street."

    In the past few years, the world has seen a rapid increase in refugees (难民), with the number hitting 60 million. Viet Thanh Nguyen's story collection The Refugees reminds us that literature is news that stays news. Set in the Vietnamese communities in California as well as in Vietnam, the stories do not aim to surprise us with new twists or shock us with wonderful details, as war and refugee stories could easily choose to do. Rather, like the young man from Bosnia, Nguyen's characters tell these stories because they are the only ones known to them.

    Included in the collection are two of the most touching pieces, both about siblings (兄弟或姊妹) separated by geography and history. In "Black-Eyed Women", the narrator (讲述人), a young Vietnamese woman, is visited by the ghost of her elder brother, who died young on the boat when the family took flight from the war. The tale of love and loss, violence and violation, may not be unfamiliar to the reader, but the determination of the brother's ghost (he has taken decades to swim across the Pacific to reach America) and the sister's abandoning herself to a half death make the story lasting.

    As an echo, the closing story, "Fatherland", explores a more complex situation between two siblings. The narrator, a young Vietnamese woman, meets her half-sister, visiting from the US for the first time. Adding to the tension is the fact that her father has named the narrator and her siblings after his first set of children. Two sisters, one American and one Vietnamese, yet named the same by the father – it may sound strange, but isn't it the fate many refugees have to face: a life left behind, that could have been theirs; and a life in an adopted country.

    The theme of doubleness –  choice and inevitability (不可避免性), home and homelessness, starting afresh and being stuck – is present not only in the stories of Vietnamese refugees, but also of those who have become refugees from their own homes and loved ones. "Smiling at your relatives never got you very far, but smiling at strangers and acquaintances sometimes did." So a pilot, who fought in the Vietnam war and is now revisiting the country for the first time, thinks while waving at the locals from a tour bus. He's distant from his daughter, just as a Mexican American in the collection is distant from his wife, or a young man from Hong Kong is distant from his father.

    The collection is full of refugees, whether from external or from a deeper, more internal conflict between even those who are closest to each other. With anger but not despair, with reconciliation (和解) but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to insult anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters.

The Truth About the Environment

    For many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting worse. They have developed a hit-list of our main fears: that natural resources are running out, that the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat, that species are becoming disappeared in huge numbers, and that the planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.

    But a quick look at the facts shows a different picture. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming disappeared, only about 0.7% of them are dying out in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been best cured not by limiting economic growth, but by accelerating it.

    Yet public opinion surveys suggest that many people hold the belief that environmental standards are declining and four factors seem to cause this gap between what they know and what the reality is.

    One is the unbalanced budget for scientific research. Scientific funding goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.

    Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes overstate their arguments. In 1997, for example, the World Wide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled: „Two thirds of the world's forests lost forever'. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.

    A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are extremely more curious about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants: That, however, can lead to significant misunderstanding. An example was that America came across EI Nino(厄尔尼诺) in 1997 and 1998. This climatic phenomenon was accused of breaking tourism, causing allergies, melting the ski-slopes, and causing 22 deaths. However, according to an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the damage was estimated at $4 billion but the benefits amounted to some $19 billion.

    The fourth factor is poor individual knowledge. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of things everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only one 12,000th of the area of the entire United States.

    It is extremely important that we look at the facts if we want to make the best possible decisions for the future. It may be costly to be overly optimistic, but more costly still to be too pessimistic.

Open water swimming

    I had only swum in open water a few times, and always in gentle lakes, so I wasn't prepared for how rough Lake Windermere appeared on a cold day. A swimmer told me the water felt colder than it had been measured, and that the water was a bit rough. But I, along with 10,000 others, was about to complete the challenge.

    Most of the people taking part were doing a one-mile race, and 10 races were planned over the weekend. There seemed to be a mix of open-water enthusiasts alongside complete beginners—which is precisely the aim of the swims, to get as many people as possible completing their own challenge. The oldest woman competing was 77, taking part in the two-mile race, alongside a man who last year had swum in every one-mile race.

    I had chosen the third one-mile race of the day. There were over 600 people in my race. We were taken through an acclimatization area  a children's paddling pool-sized part of the lake where we moved in to feel how cold the water was. "Not too bad" was everyone's thought! Then we headed out towards the middle of the lake.

    We'd been warned that the first 100 metres would be really rough. However, somewhere near the 750m mark I was still waiting for the calm; it felt more like swimming in the sea than a lake. I tried to focus on my breathing and technique, and just keep going. As I approached the 400m-to-go mark my lower right leg became painful. I recalled overhearing people talking about how they kept swimming through the pain, so I tried. But it didn't work. I began to feel the entire leg tight and painful. I didn't want to stop, so I bent my right knee and just kicked with the left leg.

    Finally I saw the finishing post, and I just concentrated on getting there—still one-legged. My finishing time was 38 minutes 25 seconds but that didn't matter—the atmosphere was fantastic and everyone felt a sense of achievement, whatever their time. I'm hooked, and want to give it another go. I've already signed up for my next open-water swim.