Us writers face criticism on all levels. Style, subject matter, relevance, character development, plot, narrative: all these things are fair game for the critic to explore and criticize or praise.

But the bottom line, the one thing that determines the basic success of any story is this: does it have an emotional truth at its core? Without that, any story is a failure. With it, even a badly written story succeeds.

Critics can debate all the paraphernalia of a story. Some stories are better told than others, to be sure. And different writers have different approaches. So what? At the heart of everything is the emotional truth that springs from their stories. Springs is probably too strong a word. Some stories whisper, and some stories hide everything until a reader, years after reading a story, suddenly understands.

I think writers try to force critics to this understanding. Science fiction writers, especially, create worlds a critic cannot conveniently criticize. Transporters, spaceships traveling at light speed, sand worms; the critic must accept the world presented to him at face value, and then only focus on the emotional truth the story presents. I believe this accounts for so much of the success of science fiction: it’s less about the science, and more about the emotion.

Us writers, and I’m not being snobbish here, who write literary fiction understand this. Emotional truth is what we are exploring, what we are illustrating, what we are dissecting in gentle and sometimes painful ways. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes not. But the need to uncover emotional truth explains our need to write, our need to share, our need to see the impact our stories have.

Then again, maybe our brains boil over with words we need to set upon the page for no other reason than self-preservation. We’d go crazy if we didn’t.