Dear Kayelle. You said it all, or certainly the heart of the matter. “If a person is passionate about something, hurt by something, or in love with someone, that triggers all the rest of the story.” Yes. it does!!! So many authors struggle, what they despair is in vain, to find their story. Yet, there it is, in that trigger place you so accurately thumbnail precisely for us. In the character’s passion, their hurt, their love — and in the obstacles to those intense emotions as those obstacles occur in their relationships in the story. The relationships are the key to what you rightly describe as the “emotional drama” of the story. All the other stuff – the plot points, the firework encounters, the traumatic events – though they are also crucial to storytelling, actually find their groundswell of story power in the emotional drama of the relationships the author creates. Without those super bright internal fireworks, the external rest is only what I think of as hardware. The software that makes the hardware work dwells in the soft center of emotional encounters, emotional relationships, emotional stories. Amen to that. And blessings upon you, always blessings. Alice