On Friday, Neal Stephenson dropped his new book Termination Shock, significant portions of which are set in Houston. I’m about a third of the way through it, and I’m delighted by how accurately he has captured the geography, neighborhoods, attitudes, diversity, and life-rhythms of my hometown. From casual references to the lack of zoning to observing that unlike roadkill, grocery store meat comes with an expiration date, his ambiance is pitch-perfect.

I mostly read fiction for the characters, and I rate fiction by how organic the characters seem to me, by which I mean that their actions are believable in the context of their traits and situations. Stephenson excels in that area, or I wouldn’t be downloading his books as soon as they appear.

Authors as varied as J. K. Rowling and Harriet Beecher Stowe have mentioned that their characters speak to them from inner voices, driving their own actions and choices; you can’t get much more organic than that. I recently read Dana Spiotta’s Wayward, which is well-written and entertaining, but I did not for a moment believe that the main character would do the things she did. Even if you’re a fiction writer, you can’t arbitrarily impose some action on a character, in this case a lazy, frantically self-obsessed middle-aged woman who can barely hold a job turning herself into a ripped body builder by going to the gym a few times a week while maintaining her diet of pastry and whisky.

I observe that this example violates both character traits and reality–don’t many of us wish we could have our cake and our waist too?–which reminds me that reality is also a criterion I use when choosing fiction. Since Stephenson describes Houston so well, I’m very willing to believe that his descriptions of royals in The Netherlands and a young Canadian looking for his Sikh roots in the Punjab are also grounded in facts. Factual grounding can even make fantastical elements stronger, for example as in Te Nahisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, in which both the harshness of slave life and the courage of those helping the slaves escape are illuminated by the magical transportations over space and time.

My ultimate example of character-driven writing is actually a non-fiction book, Mari Sandoz’ Crazy Horse. Sandoz found the historical figure of Crazy Horse compelling from her first exposure to his story. She traveled with an author friend who was researching the topic for her own book; circumstances intervened, and Sandoz was able to pick up the project. She wrote the entire biography conventionally, scrapped the manuscript, then rewrote it from within the Lakota world-view, using Lakota concepts and metaphors, and even replicating Lakota patterns of speech (quote from the Wikipedia page on Sandoz). Explaining the decision, she said Crazy Horse was in her head, asking her to tell his story his way. It’s one of my favorite books.